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ENGLAND IN 1685 



BEING CHAPTER III OF 



JGLAND 



THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAV 






Boston, U.S.A., and London 
GINN & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS 

CIk Sftbemrum }3rrcs 

1897 




\A 



4 



Copyright, 1897 
By GINN & COMPANY 



ALL RIGHTS KFsEKVKD 



THE LIBRARY 
OF C ONGR ESS 

WAJHIMOTOW 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 



I intend, in this chapter, to give a description of the state 
in which England was at the time when the crown passed 
from Charles the Second to his brother. 1 Such a description, 
composed from scanty and dispersed materials, must neces- 
sarily be very imperfect. Yet it may perhaps correct some 5 
false notions which would render the subsequent narrative 
unintelligible or uninstructive. 

If we would study with profit the history of our ancestors, 
we must be constantly on our guard against that delusion 
which the well-known names of families, places, and offices 10 
naturally produce, and must never forget that the country of 
which we read was a very different country from that in 
which we live. In every experimental science there is a 
tendency towards perfection. In every human being there 
is a wish to ameliorate his own condition. These two prin- 15 
ciples have often sufficed, even when counteracted by great 
public calamities and by bad institutions, to carry civilization 
rapidly forward. No ordinary misfortune, no ordinary mis- 
government, will do so much to make a nation wretched, as 
the constant progress of physical knowledge and the constant 20 
effort of every man to better himself will do to make a nation 
prosperous. It has often been found that profuse expendi- 
ture, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt 
tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagra- 
tions, inundations, have not been able to destroy capital so 25 
fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to 



2 ENGLAND IN 1686. 

create it. Ft can easily be proved that, in our own land, the 
national wealth has, during at least six centuries, been almost 
uninterruptedly increasing; that it was greater under the 
Tudors than under the Plantagenets ; that it was greater 
5 under the Stuarts than under the Tudors; 2 that, in spite of 
battles, sieges, and confiscations, it was greater on the day 
of the Restoration than on the day when the Long Parlia- 
ment met; 3 that, in spite of maladministration, of extrava- 
gance, of public bankruptcy, of two costly and unsuccessful 

io wars, of the pestilence, and of the fire, it was greater on the 
day of the death of Charles the Second than on the day of 
his restoration. This progress, having continued during 
many ages, became at length, about the middle of the eigh- 
teenth century, portentously rapid, and has proceeded, during 

15 the nineteenth, with accelerated velocity. In consequence 
partly of our geographical and partly of our moral position, 
we have, during several generations, been exempt from evils 
which have elsewhere impeded the efforts and destroyed the 
fruits of industry. While every part of the Continent, from 

20 Moscow to Lisbon, has been the theatre of bloody and 
devastating wars, no hostile standard has been seen here but 
as a trophy. While revolutions have taken place all around 
us, our government has never once been subverted by vio- 
lence. During a hundred years there has been in our island 

25 no tumult of sufficient importance to be called an insurrec- 
tion. The law has never been borne down either by popular 
fury or by regal tyranny. Public credit has been held sacred. 
The administration of justice has been pure. Even in times 
which might by Englishmen be justly called evil times, we 

30 have enjoyed what almost every other nation in the world 
would have considered as an ample measure of civil and 
religious freedom. Every man has felt entire confidence that 
the state would protect him in the possession of what had 
been earned by his diligence and hoarded by his self-denial. 



ENGLAND IN 1085. 3 

Under the benignant influence of peace and liberty, science 
has flourished, and has been applied to practical purposes 
on a scale never before known. The consequence is, that a 
change to which the history of the old world furnishes no 
parallel has taken place in our country. Could the England 5 
of 1685 be, by some magical process, set before our eyes, 
we should not know one landscape in a hundred or one 
building in ten thousand. The country gentleman would not 
recognize his own fields. The inhabitant of the town would 
not recognize his own street. Everything has been changed 10 
but the great features of nature, and a few massive and 
durable works of human art. We might find out Snowdon 
and Windermere, the Cheddar Cliffs and Beachy Head. We 
might find out here and there a Norman minster, or a castle 
which witnessed the Wars of the Roses. But, with such rare 15 
exceptions, everything would be strange to us. Many thous- 
ands of square miles which are now rich corn land and meadow, 
intersected by green hedgerows, and dotted with villages and 
pleasant country-seats, would appear as moors overgrown with 
furze, or fens abandoned to wild ducks. We should see 20 
straggling huts built of wood and covered with thatch where 
we now see manufacturing towns and seaports renowned to 
the farthest ends of the world. The capital itself would 
shrink to dimensions not much exceeding those of its present 
suburb on the south of the Thames. Not less strange to us 25 
would be the garb and manners of the people, the furniture 
and the equipages, the interior of the shops and dwellings. 
Such a change in the state of a nation seems to be at least 
as well entitled to the notice of an historian as any change 
of the dynasty or of the ministry. 30 

One of the first objects of an inquirer who wishes to form 
a correct notion of the state of a community at a given time 
must be to ascertain of how many persons that community 
then consisted. Unfortunately the population of England in 



4 ENGLAND IX 1686. 

1685 cannot be ascertained with perfect accuracy. For no 
great state had then adopted the wise course of periodically 
numbering the people. All men were left to conjecture for 
themselves; and, as they generally conjectured without ex- 

5 amining facts, and under the influence of strong passions 
and prejudices, their guesses were often ludicrously absurd. 
Even intelligent Londoners ordinarily talked of London as 
containing several millions of souls. It was confidently 
asserted by many that, during the thirty-five years which had 

10 elapsed between the accession of Charles the First and the 
Restoration, the population of the city had increased by two 
millions. Even while the ravages of the plague and fire 4 
were recent, it was the fashion to say that the capital still 
had a million and a half of inhabitants. Some persons, dis- 

1 5 gusted by these exaggerations, ran violently into the opposite 
extreme: Thus Isaac Vossius, a man of undoubted parts 
and learning, strenuously maintained that there were only 
two millions of human beings in England, Scotland, and 
Ireland taken together. 

20 We are not, however, left without the means of correcting 
the wild blunders into which some minds were hurried by 
national vanity, and others by a morbid love of paradox. 
There are extant three computations which seem to be enti- 
tled to peculiar attention. They are entirely independent of 

25 each other: they proceed on different principles, and yet 
there is little difference in the results. 

One of these computations was made in the year 1696 by 
Gregory King, Lancaster herald, a political arithmetician of 
great acuteness and judgment. The basis of his calculations 

30 was the number of houses returned in 1690 by the officers 
who made the last collection of the hearth money. The con- 
clusion at which he arrived was, that the population of England 
was nearly five millions and a half. 

About the same time King William the Third was desirous 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 5 

to ascertain the comparative strength of the religious sects 
into which the community was divided. An inquiry was 
instituted; and reports were laid before him from all the 
dioceses of the realm. According to these reports the num- 
ber of his English subjects must have been about five million 5 
two hundred thousand.* 

Lastly, in our own days, Mr. Finlaison, an actuary 5 of 
eminent skill, subjected the ancient parochial registers to all 
the tests which the modern improvements in statistical sci- 
ence enabled him to apply. His opinion was that, at the 10 
close of the seventeenth century, the population of England 
was a little under five million two hundred thousand souls. 

Of these three estimates, framed without concert by differ- 
ent persons from different sets of materials, the highest, 
which is that of King, does not exceed the lowest, which is 15 
that of Finlaison, by one-twelfth. We may, therefore, with 
confidence pronounce that when James the Second reigned, 
England contained between five million and five million five 
hundred thousand inhabitants. On the very highest suppo- 
sition she then had less than one-third of her present popu- 20 
lation, and less than three times the population which is now 
collected in her gigantic capital. 

The increase of the people has been great in every part 
of the kingdom, but generally much greater in the northern 
than in the southern shires. In truth a large part of the 25 
country beyond Trent was, down to the eighteenth century, 
in a state of barbarism. Physical and moral causes had 
concurred to prevent civilization from spreading to that 
region. The air was inclement ; the soil was generally such 

* The practice of reckoning the population by sects was long fashion- 30 
able. Gulliver says of the king of Brobdingnag, " He laughed at my 
odd arithmetic, as he was pleased to call it, in reckoning the numbers of 
our people by a computation drawn from the several sects among us in 
religion and politics." 



6 ENGLAND IN 1686. 

as required skillful and industrious cultivation ; and there 
could be little skill or industry in a tract which was often 
the theatre of war, and which, even when there was nominal 
peace, was constantly desolated by bands of Scottish 
5 marauders. Before the union of the two British crowns, 
and Long after that union, there was as great a difference 
between Middlesex and Northumberland as there now is 
between Massachusetts and the settlements of those squat- 
ters who, far to the west of the Mississippi, administer a 

io rude justice with the rifle and the dagger. In the reign of 
Charles the Second, the traces left by ages of slaughter and 
pillage were still distinctly perceptible, many miles south of 
the Tweed, in the face of the country and in the lawless 
manners of the people. There was still a large class of 

15 moss-troopers, 7 whose calling was to plunder dwellings and 
to drive away whole herds of cattle. It was found necessary, 
soon after the Restoration, to enact laws of great severity 
for the prevention of these outrages. The magistrates of 
Northumberland and Cumberland were authorized to raise 

20 bands of armed men for the defence of property and order ; 
and provision was made for meeting the expense of these 
levies by local taxation. The parishes were required to keep 
bloodhounds for the purpose of hunting the freebooters. 
Many old men who were living in the middle of the eigh- 

25 teenth century could well remember the time when those 
ferocious dogs were common. Yet, even with such auxiliaries, 
it was often found impossible to track the robbers to their 
retreats among the hills and morasses. For the geography 
of that wild country was very imperfectly" known. Even 

30 after the accession of George the Third, 8 the path over the 
fells from Borrowdale to Ravenglas was still a secret care- 
fully kept by the dalesmen, some of whom had probably in 
their youth escaped from the pursuit of justice by that road. 
The seats of the gentry and the larger farmhouses were 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 7 

fortified. Oxen were penned ;it night beneath the over- 
hanging battlements of the residence, which was known by 
the name of the Peel. The inmates slept with arms at their 
sides. Huge stones and boiling water were in readiness to 
crush and scald the plunderer who might venture to assail 5 
the little garrison. No traveler ventured into that country 
without making his will. The judges on circuit, with the 
whole body of barristers, attorneys, clerks, and serving men, 
rode on horseback from Newcastle to Carlisle, armed and 
escorted by a strong guard under the command of the 10 
sheriffs. It was necessary to carry provisions, for the coun- 
try was a wilderness which afforded no supplies. The spot 
where the cavalcade halted to dine, under an immense oak, 
is not yet forgotten. The irregular vigor with which crimi- 
nal justice was administered shocked observers whose life 15 
had been passed in more tranquil districts. Juries, animated 
by hatred and by a sense of common danger, convicted 
house-breakers and cattle-stealers with the promptitude of a 
court-martial in a mutiny ; and the convicts were hurried by 
scores to the gallows. Within the memory of some who are 20 
still living, the sportsman who wandered in pursuit of game 
to the sources of the Tyne, found the heaths round Keeldar 
Castle peopled by a race scarcely less savage than the Indians 
of California, and heard with surprise the half-naked women 
chanting a wild measure, while the men with brandished 25 
dirks danced a war dance. 9 

Slowly and with difficulty peace was established on the 
border. In the train of peace came industry and all the arts 
of life. Meanwhile it was discovered that the regions north 
of the Trent possessed in their coal beds a source of wealth 30 
far more precious than the gold mines of Peru. It was 
found that in the neighborhood of these beds almost every 
manufacture might be most profitably carried on. A con- 
stant stream of emigrants began to roll northward. It 



8 ENGLAND IN 1686. 

appeared, by the returns of 1841, that the aneient archiepis- 
copal province of York contained two-sevenths of the popu- 
lation of England. At the time of the Revolution that 
province was believed to contain only one-seventh of the 
5 population. In Lancashire, the number of inhabitants 
appears to have increased ninefold, while in Norfolk, 
Suffolk, and Northamptonshire, it has hardly doubled.* 

Of the taxation we can speak with more confidence and 
precision than of the population. The revenue of England, 

10 under Charles the Second, was small, when compared with 
the resources which she even then possessed, or with the 
sums which were raised by the governments of the neighbor- 
ing countries. It was little more than three-fourths of the 
revenue of the United Provinces, and was hardly one-fifth of 

15 the revenue of France. 

The most important head of receipt was the excise, which, 
in the last year of the reign of Charles, produced five hun- 
dred and eighty-five thousand pounds, clear of all deductions. 
The net proceeds of the customs amounted in the same year 

20 to five hundred and thirty thousand pounds. These burdens 
did not lie very heavy on the nation. The tax on chimneys, 10 
though less productive, raised far louder murmurs. The 
discontent excited by direct imposts is, indeed, almost always 
out of proportion to the quantity of money which they bring 

25 into the Exchequer; and the tax on chimneys was, even 
among direct imposts, peculiarly odious ; for it could be 
levied only by means of domiciliary visits, and of such visits 
the English have always been impatient to a degree which 
the people of other countries can but faintly conceive. The 

30 poorer householders were frequently unable to pay their 

* I do not, of course, pretend to strict accuracy here ; but I believe 
that whoever will take the trouble to compare the last returns of hearth 
money in the reign of William the Third with the census of 184 1 will 
come to a conclusion not very different from mine. 



ENGLAND /N 1685. 9 

hearth money to the day. When this happened, their furni- 
ture was distrained without mercy; for the tax was farmed 
and a farmer of taxes is, of all creditors, proverbially the 
most rapacious. The collectors were loudly accused of per- 
forming their unpopular duty with harshness and insolence. 5 
It was said that as soon as they appeared at the threshold 
of a cottage, the children began to wail, and the old women 
ran to hide their earthenware. Nay, the single bed of a 
poor family had sometimes been carried away and sold. 
The net annual receipt from this tax was two hundred 10 
thousand pounds.* 

When to the three great sources of income which have 
been mentioned we. add the royal domains, then far more 
extensive than at present, the first fruits and tenths, which 
had not yet been surrendered to the Church, the duchies of 15 
Cornwall and Lancaster, the forfeitures and the fines, we shall 
find that the whole annual revenue of the crown may be 
fairly estimated at about fourteen hundred thousand pounds. 

* There are, in the Pepysian Library, some ballads of that age on 
the chimney money. I will give a specimen or two : 20 

" The good old dames, whenever they the chimney man espied, 
Unto their nooks they haste away, their pots and pipkins hide. 
There is not one old dame in ten, and search the nation through, 
But, if you talk of chimney men, will spare a curse or two." 

Again: N 25 

" Like plundering soldiers they 'd enter the door, 
And make a distress on the goods of the poor, 
While frighted poor children distractedly cried : 
This nothing abated their insolent pride." 

In the British Museum there are doggerel verses composed on the 30 
same subject and in the same spirit : 

" Or if through poverty it be not paid, 
For cruelty to tear away the single bed, 
On which the poor man rests his weary head, 
At once deprives him of his rest and bread." 35 



10 ENGLAND IN 1686. 

Of the post office, more will hereafter be said. The profits 
of that establishment had been appropriated by parliament 
to the Duke of York. 

The king's revenue was, or rather ought to have been, 
5 charged with the payment of about eighty thousand pounds 
a year, the interest of the sum fraudulently detained in the 
Exchequer by the Cabal. 11 While Danby 12 was at the head 
of the finances, the creditors had received their dividends, 
though not with the strict punctuality of modern times; but 

io those who had succeeded him at the treasury had been less 
expert, or less solicitous to maintain public faith. Since the 
victory won by the court over the Whigs, not a farthing had 
been paid; and no redress was granted to the sufferers, till 
a new dynasty had established a new system. There can 

15 be no greater error than to imagine that the device of meet- 
ing the exigencies of the state by loans was imported into 
our island by William the Third. From a period of imme- 
morial antiquity it had been the practice of every English 
government to contract debts. What the Revolution 13 

20 introduced was the practice of honestly paying them. 

By plundering the public creditor, it was possible to make 
an income of about fourteen hundred thousand pounds, with 
some occasional help from France, support the necessary 
charges of the government and the wasteful expenditure of 

25 the court. For that load which pressed most heavily on the 
finances of the great continental states was here scarcely 
felt. In France, Germany, and the Netherlands, armies, 
such as Henry the Fourth and Philip the Second 14 had 
never employed in time of war, were kept up in the midst 

30 of peace. Bastions and ravelins were everywhere rising, 
constructed on principles unknown to Parma 15 or Spinola. 16 
Stores of artillery and ammunition were accumulated, such 
as even Richelieu, 17 whom the preceding generation had 
regarded as a worker of prodigies, would have pronounced 



ENGLAND IN 1686. 11 

fabulous. No man could journey many leagues in those 
countries without hearing the drums of a regiment on 
march, or being challenged by the sentinels on the draw- 
bridge of a fortress. In our island, on the contrary, it was 
possible to live long and to travel far without being once 5 
reminded, by any martial sight or sound, that the defence of 
nations had become a science and a calling. The majority 
of Englishmen who were under twenty-five years of age had 
probably never seen a company of regular soldiers. Of the 
cities which, in the Civil War, had valiantly repelled hostile 10 
armies, scarce one was now capable of sustaining a siege. 
The gates stood open night and day. The ditches were dry. 
The ramparts had been suffered to fall into decay, or were 
repaired only that the townsfolk might have a pleasant walk 
on summer evenings. Of the old baronial keeps many had 15 
been shattered by the cannon of Fairfax and Cromwell, 18 
and lay in heaps of ruin, overgrown with ivy. Those which 
remained had lost their martial character, and were now 
rural palaces of the aristocracy. The moats were turned 
into preserves of carp and pike. The mounds were planted 20 
with fragrant shrubs, through which spiral walks ran up to 
summer houses adorned with mirrors and paintings. There 
were still to be seen, on the capes of the seacoast and on 
many inland hills, tall posts, surmounted by barrels. Once 
those barrels had been filled with pitch. Watchmen had 25 
been set round them in seasons of danger; and, within a few 
hours after a Spanish sail had been discovered in the chan- 
nel, or after a thousand Scottish moss-troopers had crossed 
the Tweed, the signal fires were blazing fifty miles off, and 
whole counties were rising in arms. But many years had 3° 
now elapsed since the beacons had been lighted, and they 
were regarded rather as curious relics of ancient manners 
than as parts of a machinery necessary to the safety of the 
state. 



12 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

The only army which the law recognized was the militia. 
That force had been remodeled by two acts of parliament 
passed shortly after the Restoration. Every man who pos- 
sessed five hundred pounds a year derived from land, or six 

5 thousand pounds of personal estate, was bound to provide, 
equip, and pay, at his own charge, one horseman. Every 
man who had fifty pounds a year, derived from land, or six 
hundred pounds of personal estate, was charged in like 
manner with one pikeman or musketeer. Smaller proprietors 

o were joined together in a kind of society, for which our lan- 
guage does not afford a special name, but which an Athenian 
would have called a Synteleia; and each society was required 
to furnish, according to its means, a horse soldier or a foot 
soldier. The whole number of cavalry and infantry thus 

[5 maintained was popularly estimated at a hundred and thirty 
thousand men. 

The king was, by the ancient constitution of the realm, 
and by the recent and solemn acknowledgment of both 
Houses of parliament, the sole captain-general of this large 

20 force. The lords lieutenants and their deputies held the 
command under him, and appointed meetings for drilling 
and inspection. The time occupied by such meetings, how- 
ever, was not to exceed fourteen days in one year. The 
justices of the peace were authorized to inflict slight penal- 

25 ties for breaches of discipline. Of the ordinary cost no part 
was paid by the crown; but, when the trainbands were called 
out against an enemy, their subsistence became a charge on 
the general revenue of the state, and they were subject to the 
utmost rigor of martial law. 

30 There were those who looked on the militia with no 
friendly eye. Men who had traveled much on the Conti- 
nent, who had marveled at the stern precision with which 
every sentinel moved and spoke in the citadels built by 
Vauban, 19 who had seen the mighty armies which poured 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 13 

along all the roads of Germany to chase the Ottoman from 
the gates of Vienna, and who had been dazzled by the well- 
ordered pomp of the household troops of Louis, 20 sneered 
much at the way in which the peasants of Devonshire and 
Yorkshire marched and wheeled, shouldered muskets, and 5 
ported pikes. The enemies of the liberties and religion of 
England looked with aversion on a force which could not, 
without extreme risk, be employed against those liberties and 
that religion, and missed no opportunity of throwing ridicule 
on the rustic soldiery.* Enlightened patriots, when they 10 
contrasted these rude levies with the battalions which, in 
time of war, a few hours might bring to the coast of Kent 
or Sussex, were forced to acknowledge that, dangerous as it 
might be to keep up a permanent military establishment, it 
might be more dangerous still to stake the honor and inde- 15 
pendence of the country on the result of a contest between 
ploughmen officered by justices of the peace, and veteran 
warriors led by marshals of France. In parliament, however, 
it was necessary to express such opinions with some reserve, 
for the militia was an institution eminently popular. Every 20 
reflection thrown on it excited the indignation of both the 
great parties in the state, and especially of that party which 

* Dryden, in his Cymon and Ipkigenia, expressed, with his usual 
keenness and energy, the sentiments which had been fashionable among 
the sycophants of James the Second: 25 

N The country rings around w T ith loud alarms, 
And raw in fields the rude militia swarms; 
Mouths without hands, maintained at vast expense, 
In peace a charge, in war a weak defence. 

Stout once a month they march, a blustering band, 30 

And ever, but in time of need, at hand. 
This was the morn when, issuing on the guard, 
Drawn up in rank and file, they stood prepared 
Of seeming arms to make a short essay, 
Then hasten to be drunk, the business of the day." 35 



14 ENGLAND IN 1686. 

was distinguished by peculiar zeal for monarchy and for the 
Anglican Church. The array of the counties was commanded 
almost exclusively by Tory noblemen and gentlemen. They 
were proud of their military rank, and considered an insult 
$ offered to the service to which they belonged as offered to 
themselves. They were also perfectly aware that whatever 
was said against a militia was said in favor of a standing 
army; and the name of standing army was hateful to them. 
One such army had held dominion in England; and under 

io that dominion the king had been murdered, the nobility 
degraded, the landed gentry plundered, the Church perse- 
cuted. There was scarce a rural grandee who could not 
tell a story of wrongs and insults suffered by himself or by 
his father, at the hands of the parliamentary soldiers. One 

15 old Cavalier had seen half his manor house blown up. The 
hereditary elms of another had been hewn down. A third 
could never go into his parish church without being reminded, 
by the defaced scutcheons and headless statues of his ances- 
try, that Oliver's redcoats had once stabled their horses 

20 there. 21 The consequence was that those very royalists who 
were most ready to fight for the king themselves were the 
last persons whom he could venture to ask for the means of 
hiring regular troops. 

Charles, however, had, a few months after his restoration, 

25 begun to form a small standing army. He felt that, without 
some better protection than that of the trainbands and beef- 
eaters, his palace and person would hardly be secure in the 
vicinity of a great city swarming with warlike fifth-monarchy '■ 
men who had just been disbanded. He therefore, careless 

3° and profuse as he was, contrived to spare from his pleasures 
a sum sufficient to keep up a body of guards. With the 
increase of trade and of public wealth his revenues increased; 
and he was thus enabled, in spite of the occasional murmurs 
and remonstrances of the Commons, to make gradual addi- 



I:\GLAND IN 1685. 15 

tions to his regular forces. One considerable addition was 
made a few months before the close of his reign. The 
costly, useless, and pestilential settlement of Tangier was 
abandoned to the barbarians who dwelt around it ; and the 
garrison, consisting of one regiment of horse and two 5 
regiments of foot, was brought to England. 

The little army thus formed by Charles the Second was 
the germ of that great and renowned army which has, in the 
present century, marched triumphant into Madrid and Paris, 
into Canton and Candahar. The Life Guards, who now io 
form two regiments, were then distributed into three troops, 
each of which consisted of two hundred carabineers, exclu- 
sive of officers. This corps, to which the safety of the king 
and royal family was confided, had a very peculiar character. 
Even the privates were designated as gentlemen of the guard. 1 5 
Many of them were of good families, and had held commis- 
sions in the Civil War. Their pay was far higher than that of 
the most favored regiment of our time, and would in that,age 
have been thought a respectable provision for the younger 
son of a country gentleman. Their fine horses, their rich 20 
housings, their cuirasses, and their buff coats adorned with 
ribbons, velvet, and gold lace made a splendid appearance 
in St. James's Park. A small body of grenadier dragoons, 
who came from a lower class and received lower pay, was 
attached to each troop. Another body of household cavalry 25 
distinguished by blue coats and cloaks, and still called the 
Blues, was generally quartered in the neighborhood of the 
capital. Near the capital lay also the corps which is now 
designated as the first regiment of dragoons, but which was 
then the only regiment of dragoons on the English establish- 30 
ment. It had recently been formed out of the cavalry who 
had returned from Tangier. A single troop of dragoons, 
which did not form part of any regiment, was stationed near 
Berwick, for the purpose of keeping the peace among the 



16 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

moss-troopers of the border. For this species of service the 
dragoon was then thought to be peculiarly qualified. He 
has since become a mere horse soldier. But in the seven- 
teenth century he was accurately described by Montecuculi 
5 as a foot soldier who used a horse only in order to arrive 
with more speed at the place where military service was to 
be performed. 

The household infantry consisted of two regiments, which 
were then, as now, called the first regiment of Foot Guards 

io and the Coldstream Guards. They generally did duty near 
Whitehall and St. James's Palace. As there were then no 
barracks, and as, by the Petition of Right, they could not 
be quartered on private families, they filled all the alehouses 
of Westminster and the Strand. 

15 There were five other regiments of foot. One of these, 
called the Admiral's Regiment, was especially destined to 
service on board of the fleet. The remaining four still rank 
as the first four regiments of the line. Two of these repre- 
sented two bands which had long sustained on the Continent 

20 the fame of English valor. The first, or Royal Regiment, 
had, under the great Gustavus, borne a conspicuous part in 
the deliverance of Germany. The third regiment, distin- 
guished by flesh-colored facings, from which it derived the 
well-known name of the Buffs, had, under Maurice of Nas- 

25 sau,* 5 fought not less bravely for the deliverance of the 
Netherlands. Both these gallant brigades had at length, 
after many vicissitudes, been recalled from foreign service 
by Charles the Second, and had been placed on the English 
establishment. 

30 The regiments which now rank as the second and fourth 
of the line had, in 1685, just returned from Tangier, bringing 
with them cruel and licentious habits, contracted in a long 
course of warfare with the Moors. A few companies of in- 
fantry which had not been regimented lay in garrison at 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 17 

Tilbury Fort, at Portsmouth, at Plymouth, and at some 
other important stations on or near the coast. 

Since the beginning of the seventeenth century a great 
change had taken place in the arms of the infantry. The 
pike had been gradually giving place to the musket ; and at 5 
the close of the reign of Charles the Second, most of his foot 
were musketeers. Still, however, there was a large intermix- 
ture of pikemen. Each class of troops was occasionally 
instructed in the use of the weapon which peculiarly belonged 
to the other class. Every foot soldier had at his side a 10 
sword for close fight. The dragoon was armed like a mus- 
keteer, and was also provided with a weapon, which had, 
during many years, been gradually coming into use, and which 
the English then called a dagger, but which, from the time 
of our Revolution, has been known among us by the French 15 
name of bayonet. The bayonet seems not to have been so 
formidable an instrument of destruction as it has since 
become, for it was inserted in the muzzle of the gun ; and 
in action much time was lost while the soldier unfixed 
his bayonet in order to fire, and fixed it again in order 20 
to charge. 

The regular army which was kept up in England at the 
beginning of the year 1685 consisted, all ranks included, of 
about seven thousand foot and about seventeen hundred 
cavalry and dragoons. The whole charge amounted to 25 
about two hundred and ninety thousand pounds a year, less 
than a tenth part of what the military establishment of 
France then cost in time of peace. The daily pay of a pri- 
vate in the Life Guards was four shillings, in the Blues two 
shillings and sixpence, in the Dragoons eighteen pence, 3° 
in the Foot Guards tenpence, and in the line eightpence. 
The discipline was lax, and indeed could not be other- 
wise. The common law of England knew nothing of courts- 
martial, and made no distinction, in time of peace, between 



18 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

a soldier and any other subject; nor could the government 
then venture to ask even the most loyal parliament for a 
mutiny bill. A soldier, therefore, by knocking down his 
colonel, incurred only the ordinary penalties of assault and 
5 battery, and by refusing to obey orders, by sleeping 
on guard, or by deserting his colors, incurred no legal 
penalty at all. Military punishments were doubtless inflicted 
during the reign of Charles the Second; but they were 
inflicted very sparingly, and in such a manner as not to 

io attract public notice or to produce an appeal to the courts 
of Westminster Hall. 

Such an army as has been described was not very likely 
to enslave five millions of Englishmen. It would indeed 
have been hardly able to suppress an insurrection in London 

15 if the trainbands of the city had joined the insurgents. Nor 
could the king expect that, if a rising took place in England, 
he would be able to obtain help from his other dominions. 
For, though both Scotland and Ireland supported separate 
military establishments, those establishments were not more 

20 than sufficient to keep down the Puritan malcontents of the 
former kingdom, and the Popish malcontents of the latter. 
The government had, however, an important military re- 
source which must not be left unnoticed. There were in the 
pay of the United Provinces six fine regiments, formerly 

25 commanded by the brave Ossory. 24 Of these regiments 
three had been raised in England and three in Scotland. 
Their native prince had reserved to himself the power of 
recalling them, if he needed their help against a foreign 
or domestic enemy. In the meantime they were maintained 

30 without any charge to him, and were kept under an excellent 
discipline, to which he could not have ventured to subject 
them. 

If the jealousy of the parliament and of the nation made 
it impossible for the king to maintain a formidable standing 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 19 

army, no similar impediment prevented him from making 
England the first of maritime powers. Both Whigs and 
Tories were ready to applaud every step tending to increase 
the efficiency of that force which, while it was the best pro- 
tection of the island against foreign enemies, was powerless 5 
against civil liberty. All the greatest exploits achieved 
within the memory of that generation by English soldiers had 
been achieved in war against English princes. The victories 
of our sailors had been won over foreign foes, and had 
averted havoc and rapine from our own soil. By at least 10 
half the nation the battle of Naseby 25 was remembered with 
horror, and the battle of Dunbar 20 with pride checkered by 
many painful feelings ; but the defeat of the Armada, 27 and 
the encounters of Blake 28 with the Hollanders and Spaniards 
were recollected with unmixed exultation by all parties. 15 
Ever since the Restoration, the Commons, even when most 
discontented and most parsimonious, had always been 
bountiful even to profusion where the interest of the navy 
was concerned. It had been represented to them, while 
Danby was minister, that many of the vessels in the royal 20 
iieet were old and unfit for sea; and, although the House 
was, at that time, in no giving mood, an aid of near six 
hundred thousand pounds had been granted for the building 
of thirty new men-of-war. 

But the liberality of the nation had been made fruitless by 25 
the vices of the government. The list of the king's ships, 
it is true, looked well. There were nine first rates, fourteen 
second rates, thirty-nine third rates, and many smaller ves- 
sels. The first rates, indeed, were less than the third rates 
of our time ; and the third rates would not now rank as very 30 
large frigates. This force, however, if it had been efficient, 
would in those days have been regarded by the greatest 
potentate as formidable. But it existed only on paper. 
When the reign of Charles terminated, his navy had sunk 



20 ENGLAND IN 1GS5. 

into degradation and decay, such as would be almost incred- 
ible if it were not certified to us by the independent and 
concurring evidence of witnesses whose authority is beyond 
exception. Pepys, 2a the ablest man in the English admiralty, 
5 drew up, in the year 1684, a memorial on the state of his 
department, for the information of Charles. A few months 
later Bonrepaux, the ablest man in the French admiralty, 
having visited England for the especial purpose of ascertain- 
ing her maritime strength, laid the result of his inquiries 

10 before Louis. The two reports are to the same effect. 
Bonrepaux declared that he found everything in disorder 
and in miserable condition, that the superiority of the French 
marine was acknowledged with shame and envy at White- 
hall, and that the state of our shipping and dockyards was 

15 of itself a sufficient guarantee that we should not meddle in 
the disputes of Europe. Pepys informed his master that the 
naval administration was a prodigy of wastefulness, corrup- 
tion, ignorance, and indolence, that no estimate could be 
trusted, that no contract was performed, that no check was 

20 enforced. The vessels which the recent liberality of parlia- 
ment had enabled the government to build, and which had 
never been out of harbor, had been made of such wretched 
timber that they were more unfit to go to sea than the old 
hulls which had been battered thirty years before by Dutch 

25 and Spanish broadsides. Some of the new men-of-war, 
indeed, were so rotten that, unless speedily repaired, they 
would go down at their moorings. The sailors were paid 
with so little punctuality that they were glad to find some 
usurer who would purchase their tickets at forty per cent 

30 discount. The commanders who had not powerful friends 
at court were even worse treated. Some officers to whom 
large arrears were due, after vainly importuning the govern- 
ment during many years, had died for want of a morsel 
of bread. 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 21 

Most of the ships which were afloat were commanded by 
men who had not been bred to the sea. This, it is true, 
was not an abuse introduced by the government of Charles. 
No state, ancient or modern, had, before that time, made a 
complete separation between the naval and military services. 5 
In the great civilized nations of the old world, Cimon and 
Lysander, Pompey and Agrippa 30 had fought battles by sea as 
well as by land. Nor had the impulse which nautical science 
received at the close of the fifteenth century produced any 
material improvement in the division of labor. At Flodden 31 10 
the right wing of the victorious army was led by the admiral 
of England. At Jarnac and Moncontour 32 the Huguenot 
ranks were marshaled by the admiral of France. 33 Neither 
John of Austria, 34 the conqueror of Lepanto, nor Lord 
Howard of Effingham, 35 to whose direction the marine of 15 
England was intrusted when the Spanish invaders were 
approaching our shores, had received the education of a 
sailor. Raleigh, 30 highly celebrated as a naval commander, 
had served during many years as a soldier in France, the 
Netherlands, and Ireland. Blake had distinguished himself 20 
by his skillful and valiant defence of an inland town before 
he humbled the pride of Holland and of Castile on the 
ocean. Since the Restoration the same system had been 
followed. Great fleets had been intrusted to the direction 
of Rupert and Monk, 37 Rupert, who was renowned chiefly 25 
as a hot and daring cavalry officer, and Monk, who, when 
he wanted his ship to tack to larboard, moved the mirth of 
his crew by calling out, M Wheel to the left." 

But about this time wise men began to perceive that the 
rapid improvement, both of the art of war and of the art of 3° 
navigation, made it necessary to draw a line between two 
professions which had hitherto been confounded. Either 
the command of a regiment or the command of a ship was 
now a matter quite sufficient to occupy the attention of a 



22 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

single mind. In the year 1672 the French 
determined to educate young men of good family from a 
very early age specially for the sea service. But the English 
government, instead of following this excellent example, not 
5 only continued to distribute high naval commands among 
landsmen, but selected for such commands landsmen who, 
even on land, could not safely have been put in any impor- 
tant trust. Any lad of noble birth, any dissolute courtier, 
for whom one of the king's mistresses would speak a word, 
10 might hope that a ship of the line, and with it the honor of 
the country and the lives of hundreds of brave men, would 
be committed to his care. It mattered not that he had 
never in his life taken a voyage except on the Thames, that 
he could not keep his feet in a breeze, that he did not 
15 know the difference between latitude and longitude. No 
previous training was thought necessary ; or, at most, he 
was sent to make a short trip in a man-of-war, where he 
was subjected to no discipline, where he was treated with 
marked respect, and where he lived in a round of revels and 
20 amusements. If, in the intervals of feasting, drinking, and 
gambling, he succeeded in learning the meaning of a few 
technical phrases and the names of the points of the com- 
pass, he was fully qualified to take charge of a three-decker. 
This is no imaginary description. In 1666, John Sheffield, 
25 Earl of Mulgrave, at seventeen years of age, volunteered to 
serve at sea against the Dutch. He passed six weeks on 
board, diverting himself, as well as he could, in the society 
of some young libertines of rank, and then returned home 
to take the command of a troop of horse. After this he was 
30 never on the water till the year 1672, when he again joined 
the fleet, and was almost immediately appointed captain of 
a ship of eighty-four guns, reputed the finest in the navy. 
He was then twenty-three years old, and had not, in the 
whole course of his life, been three months afloat. As soon 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 23 

as he came back from sea he was made colonel of a regi- 
ment of foot. This is a specimen of the manner in which 
naval commands of the highest importance were then given, 
and a favorable specimen ; for Mulgrave, though he wanted 
experience, wanted neither parts nor courage. Others were 5 
promoted in the same way who not only were not good 
officers, but who were intellectually and morally incapable 
of ever becoming good officers, and whose only recommen- 
dation was that they had been ruined by folly and vice. 
The chief bait which allured these men into the service was 10 
the profit of conveying bullion and other valuable commodi- 
ties from port to port, for both the Atlantic and the Medi- 
terranean were then so much infested by pirates from 
Barbary that merchants were not willing to trust precious 
cargoes to any custody but that of a man-of-war. A captain 1 5 
in this way sometimes cleared several thousands of pounds 
by a short voyage, and for this lucrative business he too 
often neglected the interests of his country and the honor of 
his flag, made mean submissions to foreign powers, disobeyed 
the most direct injunctions of his superiors, lay in port when 20 
he was ordered to chase a Sallee rover, or ran with dollars 
to Leghorn when his instructions directed him to repair to 
Lisbon. And all this he did with impunity. The same 
interest which had placed him in a post for which he was 
unfit maintained him there. No admiral, bearded by these 25 
corrupt and dissolute minions of the palace, dared to do 
more than mutter something about a court-martial. If any 
officer showed a higher sense of duty than his fellows, he 
soon found that he lost money without acquiring honor. 
One captain who, by strictly obeying the orders of the 3° 
admiralty, missed a cargo which would have been worth four 
thousand pounds to him was told by Charles, with ignoble 
levity, that he was a great fool for his pains. 

The discipline of the navy was of a piece throughout. 



24 • ENGLAND IN 1686. 

As the courtly captain despised the admiralty, he was in 
turn despised by his crew. It could not be concealed that 
he was inferior in seamanship to every foremast man on 
board. It was idle to expect that old sailors, familiar with 
5 the hurricanes of the tropics and with the icebergs of the 
Arctic Circle, would pay prompt and respectful obedience to 
a chief who knew no more of winds and waves than could 
be learned in a gilded barge between Whitehall Stairs 88 and 
Hampton Court. 80 To trust such a novice with the working 
io of a ship was evidently impossible. The direction of the 
navigation was therefore taken from the captain and given 
to the master ; but this partition of authority produced 
innumerable inconveniences. The line of demarcation was 
not, and perhaps could not be, drawn with precision. There 
15 was, therefore, constant wrangling. The captain, confident 
in proportion to his ignorance, treated the master with lordly 
contempt. The master, well aware of the danger of dis- 
obliging the powerful, too often, after a struggle, yielded 
against his better judgment ; and it was well if the loss of 
20 ship and crew was not the consequence. In general, the 
least mischievous of the aristocratic captains were those who 
completely abandoned to others the direction of their vessels, 
and thought only of making money and spending it. The 
way in which these men lived was so ostentatious and volup- 
25 tuous that, greedy as they were of gain, they seldom became 
rich. They dressed as if for a gala at Versailles, ate off 
plate, drank the richest wines, and kept harems on board, 
while hunger and scurvy raged among the crews, and while 
corpses were daily flung out of the port-holes. 
30 Such was the ordinary character of those who were then 
called gentlemen captains. Mingled with them were to be 
found, happily for our country, naval commanders of a very 
different description, men whose whole life had been passed 
on the deep, and who had worked and fought their way from 



ENGLAND IN 1686. 25 

the lowest offices of the forecastle to rank and distinction. 
One of the most eminent of these officers was Sir Christopher 
Mings, who entered the service as a cabin boy, who fell fight- 
ing bravely against the Dutch, and whom his crew, weeping 
and vowing vengeance, carried to the grave. From him 5 
sprang, by a singular kind of descent, a line of valiant and 
expert sailors. His cabin boy was Sir John Narborough; 
and the cabin boy of Sir John Narborough was Sir Cloudes- 
ley Shovel. 40 To the strong natural sense and dauntless 
courage of this class of men England owes a debt never to 10 
be forgotten. It was by such resolute hearts that, in spite 
of much maladministration, and in spite of the blunders of 
more courtly admirals, our coasts were protected and the 
reputation of our flag upheld during many gloomy and peril- 
ous years. But to a landsman these tarpaulins, as they were 15 
called, seemed a strange and half-savage race. All their 
knowledge was professional; and their professional knowl- 
edge was practical rather than scientific. Off their own 
element they were as simple as children. Their deportment 
was uncouth. There was roughness in their very good- 20 
nature; and their talk, where it was not made up of nautical 
phrases, was too commonly made up of oaths and curses. 
Such were the chiefs in whose rude school were formed 
those sturdy warriors from whom Smollett, 41 in the next age, 
drew Lieutenant Bowling and Commodore Trunnion. But 25 
it does not appear that there was in the service of any of the 
Stuarts a single naval officer such as, according to the notions 
of our times, a naval officer ought to be, that is to say, a man 
versed in the theory and practice of his calling, and steeled 
against all the dangers of battle and tempest, yet of cultivated 3° 
mind and polished manners. There were gentlemen and 
there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But 
the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not 
seamen. 



26 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

The English navy at that time might, according to the 
most exact estimates which have come down to us, have been 
kept in an efficient state for three hundred and eighty thou- 
sand pounds a year. Four hundred thousand pounds a year 
5 was the sum actually expended, but expended, as we have 
seen, to very little purpose. The cost of the French marine 
was nearly the same; the cost of the Dutch marine consider- 
ably more. 

The charge of the English ordnance in the seventeenth 

io century was, as compared with other military and naval 
charges, much smaller than at present. At most of the gar- 
risons there were gunners, and here and there, at an important 
post, an engineer was to be found. But there was no regi- 
ment of artillery, no brigade of sappers and miners, no col- 

15 lege in which young soldiers could learn the scientific part 
of war. The difficulty of moving field-pieces was extreme. 
When, a few years later, William marched from Devonshire 
to London, the apparatus which he brought with him, though 
such as had long been in constant use on the Continent, and 

20 such as would now be regarded at Woolwich as rude and 
cumbrous, excited in our ancestors an admiration resembling 
that which the Indians of America felt for the Castilian 
arquebusses. The stock of gunpowder kept in the English 
forts and arsenals was boastfully mentioned by patriotic 

25 writers as something which might well impress neighboring 
nations with awe. It amounted to fourteen or fifteen thou- 
sand barrels, about a twelfth of the quantity which it is now 
thought necessary to have always in store. The .expenditure 
under the head of Ordnance was on an average a little above 

30 sixty thousand pounds a year. 

The whole effective charge of the army, navy, and ord- 
nance was about seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds. 
The non-effective charge, which is now a heavy part of our 
public burdens, can hardly be said to have existed. A very 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 27 

small number of naval officers, who were not employed in 
the public service, drew half pay. No lieutenant was on the 
list, nor any captain who had not commanded a ship of the 
first or second rate. As the country then possessed only 
seventeen ships of the first and second rates that had ever 5 
been at sea, and as a large proportion of the persons who 
had commanded such ships had good posts on shore, the 
expenditure under this head must have been small indeed. 
In the army, half pay was given merely as a special and tem- 
porary allowance to a small number of officers belonging to 10 
two regiments, which were peculiarly situated. Greenwich 
Hospital had not been founded. Chelsea Hospital was 
building; but the cost of that institution was defrayed partly 
by a deduction from the pay of the troops, and partly by pri- 
vate subscription. The king promised to contribute only 15 
twenty thousand pounds for architectural expenses, and five 
thousand a year for the maintenance of the invalids. It was 
no part of the plan that there should be outpensioners. The 
whole non-effective charge, military and naval, can scarcely 
have exceeded ten thousand pounds a year. It now exceeds 20 
ten thousand pounds a day. 

Of the expense of civil government only a small portion 
was defrayed by the crown. The great majority of the 
functionaries whose business was to administer justice and 
preserve order either gave their services to the public gratui- 25 
tously, or were remunerated in a manner which caused no 
drain on the revenue of the state. The sheriffs, mayors, and 
aldermen of the towns, the country gentlemen who were in 
the commission of the peace, the headboroughs, bailiffs, and 
petty constables, cost the king nothing. The superior courts 30 
of law were chiefly supported by fees. 

Our relations with foreign courts had been put on the 
most economical footing. The only diplomatic agent who 
had the title of ambassador resided at Constantinople, and 



28 ENGLAND IN 1686. 

was partly supported by the Turkey Company. Even at the 
court of Versailles England had only an envoy; and she had 
not even an envoy at the Spanish, Swedish, and Danish 
courts. The whole expense under this head cannot, in the 
S last year of the reign of Charles the Second, have much 
exceeded twenty thousand pounds. 

In this frugality there was nothing laudable. Charles was, 
as usual, niggardly in the wrong place, and munificent in the 
wrong place. The public service was starved that courtiers 

10 might be pampered. The expense of the navy, of the ord- 
nance, of pensions to needy old officers, of missions to foreign 
courts, must seem small indeed to the present generation. 
But the personal favorites of the sovereign, his ministers, and 
the creatures of those ministers, were gorged with public 

15 money. Their salaries and pensions, when compared with 
the incomes of the nobility, the gentry, the commercial and 
professional men of that age, will appear enormous. The 
greatest estates in the kingdom then very little exceeded 
twenty thousand a year. The Duke of Ormond had twenty- 

20 two thousand a year. The Duke of Buckingham, before his 
extravagance had impaired his great property, had nineteen 
thousand six hundred a year. George Monk, Duke of Albe- 
marle, who had been rewarded for his eminent services with 
immense grants of crown land, and who had been notorious 

25 both for covetousness and for parsimony, left fifteen thousand 
a year of real estate, and sixty thousand pounds in money 
which probably yielded seven per cent. These three dukes 
were supposed to be three of the very richest subjects 
in England. The archbishop of Canterbury can hardly have 

30 had five thousand a year. The average income of a tem- 
poral peer was estimated, by the best-informed persons, at 
about three thousand a year, the average income of a baronet 
at nine hundred a year, the average income of a member of 
parliament at less than eight hundred a year. A thousand 



ENGLAND IN 1686. 29 

a year was thought a large revenue for a barrister. Two 
thousand a year was hardly to be made in the Court of 
King's Bench, except by the crown lawyers. It is evident, 
therefore, that an official man would have been well paid if 
he had received a fourth or fifth part of what would now be 5 
an adequate stipend. In fact, however, the stipends of the 
higher class of official men were as large as at present, and 
not seldom larger. The lord treasurer, for example, had 
eight thousand a year, and, when the treasury was in com- 
mission, the junior lords had sixteen hundred a year each. 10 
The paymaster of the forces had a poundage, 42 amounting to 
about five thousand a year, on all the money which passed 
through his hands. The groom of the stole 43 had five thou- 
sand a year, the commissioners of the customs twelve hundred 
a year each, the lords of the bedchamber a thousand a year 15 
each. The regular salary, however, was the smallest part of 
the gains of an official man of that age. From the noble- 
men who held the white staff and the great seal down to the 
humblest tidewaiter and gauger, what would now be called 
gross corruption was practiced without disguise and without 20 
reproach. Titles, places, commissions, pardons were daily 
sold in market overt by the great dignitaries of the realm; 
and every clerk in every department imitated, to the best of 
his power, the evil example. 

During the last century no prime minister, however pow- 25 
erful, has become rich in office, and several prime ministers 
have impaired their private fortune in sustaining their public 
character. In the seventeenth century a statesman who was 
at the head of affairs might easily, and without giving scan- 
dal, accumulate in no long time an estate amply sufficient to 3° 
support a dukedom. It is probable that the income of the 
prime minister, during his tenure of power, far exceeded 
that of any other subject. The place of lord lieutenant of 
Ireland was supposed to be worth forty thousand pounds a 



30 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

year. The gains of the Chancellor Clarendon, of Arlington, 
of Lauderdale, and of Danby were enormous. The sump- 
tuous palace to which the populace of London gave the 
name of Dunkirk House, the stately pavilions, the fish ponds, 

5 the deer park, and the orangery of Euston, the more than 
Italian luxury of Ham, with its busts, fountains, and aviaries, 
were among the many signs which indicated what was the 
shortest road to boundless wealth. This is the true explana- 
tion of the unscrupulous violence with which the statesmen 

io of that day struggled for office, of the tenacity with which, 
in spite of vexations, humiliations, and dangers, they clung 
to it, and of the scandalous compliances to which they 
stooped in order to retain it. Even in our own age, great 
as is the power of opinion, and high as is the standard of 

15 integrity, there would be great risk of a lamentable change 
in the character of our public men, if the place of first lord 
of the treasury or secretary of state were worth a hundred 
thousand pounds a year. Happily for our country the 
emoluments of the highest class of functionaries have not 

20 only not grown in proportion to the general growth of our 
opulence, but have positively diminished. 

The fact that the sum raised in England by taxation has 
in a time not exceeding two long lives been mutiplied thirty- 
fold is strange, and may at first sight seem appalling. But 

25 those who are alarmed by the increase of the public burdens 
may perhaps be reassured when they have considered the 
increase of the public resources. In the year 1685 the value 
of the produce of the soil far exceeded the value of all the 
other fruits of human industry. Yet agriculture was in what 

30 would now be considered as a very rude and imperfect state. 
The arable land and pasture land were not supposed by the 
best political arithmeticians of that age to amount to much 
more than half the area of the kingdom. The remainder 
was believed to consist of moor, forest, and fen. These 



ENGLAND TA 1685. 31 

computations are strongly confirmed by the road books and 
maps of the seventeenth century. From those books and 
maps it is clear that many routes which now pass through an 
endless succession of orchards, hayfields, and beannelds then 
ran through nothing but heath, swamp, and warren.* In 5 
the drawings of English landscapes made in that age for the 
Grand Duke Cosmo, scarce a hedgerow is to be seen, and 
numerous tracts, now rich with cultivation, appear as bare 
as Salisbury Plain. 44 At Enfield, hardly out of sight of the 
smoke of the capital, was a region of five and twenty miles 10 
in circumference which contained only three houses and 
scarcely any enclosed fields. Deer, as free as in an American 
forest, wandered there by thousands. 45 It is to be remarked 
that wild animals of large size were then far more numerous 
than at present. The last wild boars, indeed, which had T 5 
been preserved for the royal diversion, and had been allowed 
to ravage the cultivated land with their tusks, had been 
slaughtered by the exasperated rustics during the license of 
the Civil War. The last wolf that has roamed our island had 
been slain in Scotland a short time before the close of the 20 
reign of Charles the Second. But many breeds, now extinct 
or rare, both of quadrupeds and birds, were still common. 
The fox, whose life is, in many counties, held almost as 
sacred as that of a human being, was considered as a mere 
nuisance. Oliver St. John told the Long Parliament that 2 5 
Strafford was to be regarded, not as a stag or a hare, to whom 
some law was to be given, but as a fox, who was to be snared 
by any means, and knocked on the head without pity. This 
illustration would be by no means a happy one if addressed 
to country gentlemen of our time; but in St. John's day 3° 

* The proportion of unenclosed country seems to have been very 
great. From Abingdon to Gloucester, for example, a distance of forty 
or fifty miles, there was not a single enclosure', and scarcely one enclo- 
sure between Biggleswade and Lincoln. 



32 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

there were not seldom great massacres of foxes to which the 
peasantry thronged with all the dogs that could be mustered; 
traps were set; nets were spread^ no quarter was given ; and 
to shoot a female with cub was considered as a feat which 
5 merited the gratitude of the neighborhood. The red deer 
were then as common in Gloucestershire and Hampshire as 
they now are among the Grampian Hills. On one occasion 
Queen Anne, 4G on her way to Portsmouth, saw a herd of no 
less than five hundred. The wild bull with his white mane 

io was still to be found wandering in a few of the southern 
forests. The badger made his dark and tortuous hole on the 
side of every hill where the copsewood grew thick. The 
wild cats were frequently heard by night wailing round 
the lodges of the rangers of Whittlebury and Needwood. 

15 The yellow-breasted martin was still pursued in Cranbourne 
Chase for his fur, reputed inferior only to that of the sable. 
Fen eagles, measuring more than nine feet between the 
extremities of the wings, preyed on fish along the coast of 
Norfolk. On all the downs, from the British Channel to 

20 Yorkshire, huge bustards strayed in troops of fifty or sixty, 
and were often hunted with greyhounds. The marshes of 
Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire were covered during some 
months of every year by immense clouds of cranes. Some 
of these races the progress of cultivation has extirpated. 

25 Of others the numbers are so much diminished that men 
crowd to gaze at a specimen as at a Bengal tiger or a Polar 
bear. 

The progress of this great change can nowhere be more 
clearly traced than in the Statute Book. The number of 

30 enclosure acts passed since King George the Second came 
to the throne exceeds four thousand. 47 The area enclosed 
under the authority of those acts exceeds, on a moderate 
calculation, ten thousand square miles. How many square 
miles which formerly Lay waste have, during the same period, 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 33 

been fenced and carefully tilled by the proprietors, without 
any application to the legislature, can only be conjectured. 
But it seems highly probable that a fourth part of England 
has been, in the course of little more than a century, turned 
from a wild into a garden. 5 

Even in those parts of the kingdom which at the close of 
the reign of Charles the Second were the best cultivated, the 
farming, though greatly improved since the Civil War, was 
not such as would now be thought skillful. To this day no 
effectual steps have been taken by public authority for the 10 
purpose of obtaining accurate accounts of the produce of the 
English soil. The historian must therefore follow, with 
some misgivings, the guidance of those writers on statistics 
whose reputation for diligence and fidelity stands highest. 
At present an average crop of wheat, rye, barley, oats, and 15 
beans is supposed considerably to exceed thirty millions of 
quarters. The crop of wheat would be thought poor if 
it did not exceed twelve millions of quarters. According to 
the computation made in the year 1696 by Gregory King, 
the whole quantity of wheat, rye, barley, oats, and 20 
beans then annually grown in the kingdom was somewhat 
less than ten millions of quarters. The wheat, which was 
then cultivated only on the strongest clay and consumed 
only by those who were in easy circumstances, he estimated 
at less than two millions of quarters. Charles Davenant, an 25 
acute and well-informed, though most unprincipled and ran- 
corous, politician, differed from King as to some of the 
items of the account, but came to nearly the same general 
conclusions. 

The rotation of crops was very imperfectly understood. 30 
It was known, indeed, that some vegetables lately introduced 
into our island, particularly the turnip, afforded excellent 
nutriment in winter to sheep and oxen ; but it was not yet 
the practice to feed cattle in this manner. It was therefore 



34 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

by no means easy to keep them alive during the season when 
the grass is scanty. They were killed in great numbers and 
salted at the beginning of the cold weather; and, during sev- 
eral months, even the gentry tasted scarcely any fresh animal 
5 food, except game and river fish, which were consequently 
much more important articles in housekeeping than at pres- 
ent. It appears from the Northumberland Household Book 4S 
that, in the reign of Henry the Seventh, fresh meat was 
never eaten even by the gentlemen attendant on a great earl, 

io except during the short interval between midsummer and 
Michaelmas. But in the course of two centuries an improve- 
ment had taken place ; and under Charles the Second it 
was not till the beginning of November that families laid in 
their stock of salt provisions, then called Martinmas beef. 

15 The sheep and the ox of that time were diminutive when 
compared with the sheep and oxen which are now driven to 
our markets. Our native horses, though serviceable, were 
held in small esteem and fetched low prices. They were 
valued, one with another, by the ablest of those who computed 

20 the national wealth, at not more than fifty shillings each. 
Foreign breeds were greatly preferred. Spanish jennets 
were regarded as the finest chargers, and were imported for 
purposes of pageantry and war. The coaches of the aris- 
tocracy were drawn by gray Flemish mares, which trotted, 

25 as it was thought, with a peculiar grace, and endured better 
than any cattle reared in our island the work of dragging a 
ponderous equipage over the rugged pavement of London. 
Neither the modern dray horse nor the modern race horse 
was then known. At a much later period the ancestors of 

.30 the gigantic quadrupeds, which all foreigners now class 
among the chief wonders of London, were brought from the 
marshes of Walcheren; the ancestors of Childers and Eclipse 
from the sands of Arabia. Already, however, there was 
among our nobility and gentry a passion for the amusements 



EX GLAND IX 1685. 35 

of the turf. The importance of improving our studs by an 
infusion of new blood was strongly felt; and with this view 
a considerable number of barbs had lately been brought into 
the country. Two men whose authority on such subjects 
was held in great esteem, the Duke of Newcastle and Sir 5 
John Fenwick, pronounced that the meanest hack ever 
imported from Tangier would produce a finer progeny than 
could be expected from the best sire of our native breed. 
They would not readily have believed that a time would come 
when the princes and nobles of neighboring lands would be 10 
as eager to obtain horses from England as ever the English 
had been to obtain horses from Barbary.* 

The increase of vegetable and animal produce, though 
great, seems small when compared with the increase of our 
mineral wealth. In 1685 the tin of Cornwall, which had, 15 
more than two thousand years before, attracted the Tyrian 
sails beyond the pillars of Hercules, 49 was still one of the 
most valuable subterranean productions of the island. The 
quantity annually extracted from the earth was found to be, 
some years later, sixteen hundred tons, probably about a 20 
third of what it now is. But the veins of copper which lie 
in the same region were, in the time of Charles the Second, 
altogether neglected, nor did any land-owner take them into 
the account in estimating the value of his property. Corn- 
wall and Wales at present yield annually near fifteen thou- 25 
sand tons of copper, worth near a million and a half sterling, 
that is to say, worth about twice as much as the annual 
produce of all English mines of all descriptions in the seven- 
teenth century. The first bed of rock salt had been dis- 
covered not long after the Restoration in Cheshire, but does 30 

* The " dappled Flanders mares " were marks of greatness in the 
time of Pope, and even later. The vulgar proverb that the gray mare 
is the better horse originated, I suspect, in the preference generally given 
to the gray mares of Flanders over the finest coach horses of England. 



7 



36 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

not appear to have been worked in that age. The salt, 
which was obtained by a rude process from brine pits, was 
held in no high estimation. The pans in which the manu- 
facture was carried on exhaled a sulphurous stench ; and, 
5 when the evaporation was complete, the substance which was 
left was scarcely fit to be used with food. Physicians attrib- 
uted the scorbutic and pulmonary complaints which were 
common among the English to this unwholesome condiment. 
It was therefore seldom used by the upper and middle 

io classes ; and there was a regular and considerable importa- 
tion from France. At present our springs and mines not 
only supply our own immense demand, but send annually 
seven hundred millions of pounds of excellent salt to foreign 
countries. 

15 Far more important has been the improvement of our iron 
works. Such works had long existed in our island, but had 
not prospered, and had been regarded with no favorable eye 
by the government and by the public. It was not then the 
practice to employ coal for smelting the ore ; and the rapid 

20 consumption of wood excited the alarm of politicians. As 
early as the reign of Elizabeth there had been loud com- 
plaints that whole forests were cut down for the purpose of 
feeding the furnaces ; and the parliament had interfered to 
prohibit the manufacturers from burning timber. The manu- 

25 facture consequently languished. At the close of the reign 
of Charles the Second, great part of the iron which was 
used in the country was imported from abroad; and the whole 
quantity cast here annually seems not to have exceeded ten 
thousand tons. At present the trade is thought to be in a 

30 depressed state if less than eight hundred thousand tons are 
produced in a year. 

( >ne mineral, perhaps more important than iron itself, 
remains to be mentioned. Coal, though very little used in 
any species of manufacture, was already the ordinary fuel 



EA GLANL TN 1685. 37 

in some districts which were fortunate enough to possess 
large beds, and in the capital, which could easily be supplied 
by water carriage. It seems reasonable to believe that at 
least one-half of the quantity then extracted from the pits 
was consumed in London. The consumption of London 5 
seemed to the writers of that age enormous, and was often 
mentioned by them as a proof of the greatness of the impe- 
rial city. They scarcely hoped to be believed when they 
affirmed that two hundred and eighty thousand chaldrons, 
that is to say, about three hundred and fifty thousand tons, 10 
were, in the last year of the reign of Charles the Second, 
brought to the Thames. At present near three millions and 
a half of tons are required yearly by the metropolis; and the 
whole annual produce cannot, on the most moderate compu- 
tation, be estimated at less than twenty millions of tons.* 15 

While these great changes have been in progress, the rent 
of land has, as might be expected, been almost constantly 
rising. In some districts it has multiplied more than tenfold. 
In some it has not more than doubled. It has probably, on 
the average, quadrupled. 20 

,=r— Of the rent, a large proportion was divided among the 
country gentlemen, a class of persons whose position and 
character it is most important that we should clearly under- 
stand ; for by their influence and by their passions the 
fate of the nation was, at several important conjunctures, 25 
determined. 

We should be much mistaken if we pictured to ourselves 
the squires of the seventeenth century as men bearing a close 
resemblance to their descendants, the county members and 
chairmen of quarter sessions with whom we are familiar. 30 
The modern country gentleman generally receives a liberal 
education, passes from a distinguished school to a distin- 

* In 1845 tne quantity of coal brought into London appeared, by the 
parliamentary returns, to be 3,460,000 tons. 



3S ENGLAND IN 1685. 

guished college, and has every opportunity to become an 
excellent scholar. He has generally seen something of for- 
eign countries. A considerable part of his life has generally 
been passed in the capital, and the refinements of the capital 

5 follow him into the country. There is perhaps no class of 
dwellings so pleasing as the rural seats of the English gentry. 
In the parks and pleasure-grounds, nature, dressed yet not 
disguised by art, wears her almost alluring form. In the 
buildings good sense and good taste combine to produce a 

10 happy union of the comfortable and the graceful. The pic- 
tures, the musical instruments, the library would in any 
other country be considerered as proving the owner to be 
an eminently polished and accomplished man. A country 
gentleman who witnessed the Revolution was probably in 

15 receipt of about a fourth part of the rent which his acres 
now yield to his posterity. He was, therefore, as compared 
with his posterity, a poor man, and was generally under the 
necessity of residing, with little interruption, on his estate. 
To travel on the Continent, to maintain an establishment in 

20 London, or even to visit London frequently, were pleasures 
in which only the great proprietors could indulge. It may 
be confidently affirmed that of the squires whose names were 
in King Charles's commissions of peace and lieutenancy not 
one in twenty went to town once in five years, or had ever 

25 in his life wandered so far as Paris. Many lords of manors 
had received an education differing little from that of their 
menial servants. The heir of an estate often passed his 
boyhood and youth at the seat of his family with no better 
tutors than grooms and gamekeepers, and scarce attained 

30 learning enough to sign his name to a mittimus. If he went 
to school and to college, he generally returned before he was 
twenty to the seclusion of the old hall, and there, unless his 
mind were very happily constituted by nature, soon forgot 
his academical pursuits in rural business and pleasures. 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 39 

His chief serious employment was the care of his property. 
He examined samples of grain, handled pigs, and on market 
clays made bargains over a tankard with drovers and hop 
merchants. His chief pleasures were commonly derived from 
field sports and from an unrefined sensuality. His language 5 
and pronunciation were such as we should now expect to 
hear only from the most ignorant clowns. His oaths, coarse 
jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse were uttered with the 
broadest accent of his province. It was easy to discern, 
from the first words which he spoke, whether he came from 10 
Somersetshire or Yorkshire. He troubled himself little about 
decorating his abode, and, if he attempted decoration, seldom 
produced anything but deformity. The litter of a farmyard 
gathered under the windows of his bedchamber, and the 
cabbages and gooseberry bushes grew close to his hall door. 15 
His table was loaded with coarse plenty, and guests were 
cordially welcomed to it. But, as the habit of drinking to 
excess was general in the class to which he belonged, and as 
his fortune did not enable him to intoxicate large assemblies 
daily with claret or canary, strong beer was the ordinary 20 
beverage. The quantity of beer consumed in those days 
was indeed enormous. For beer then was to the middle and 
lower classes, not only all that beer now is, but all that wine, 
tea, and ardent spirits now are. It was only at great houses 
or on great occasions that foreign drink was placed on the 25 
board. The ladies of the house, whose business it had com- 
monly been to cook the repast, retired as soon as the dishes 
had been devoured, and left the gentlemen to their ale and 
tobacco. The coarse jollity of the afternoon was often 
prolonged till the revellers were laid under the table. 3° 

It was very seldom that the country gentleman caught 
glimpses of the great world, and what he saw of it tended 
rather to confuse than to enlighten his understanding. His 
opinions respecting religion, government, foreign countries, 



40 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

and former times, having been derived, not from study, from 
observation, or from conversation with enlightened compan- 
ions, but from such traditions as were current in his own 
small circle, were the opinions of a child. He adhered to 
5 them, however, with the obstinacy which is generally found 
in ignorant men accustomed to be fed with flattery. His 
animosities were numerous and bitter. He hated French- 
men and Italians, Scotchmen and Irishmen, Papists and 
Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists, Quakers and 

io Jews. Towards London and Londoners he felt an aversion 
which more than once produced important political effects. 
His wife and daughter were in tastes and acquirements 
below a housekeeper or a stillroom maid of the present day. 
They stitched and spun, brewed gooseberry wine, cured 

15 marigolds, and made the crust for the venison pasty. 

From this description it might be supposed that the Eng- 
lish esquire of the seventeenth century did not materially 
differ from a rustic miller or alehouse keeper of our time. 
There are, however, some important parts of his character 

20 still to be noted which will greatly modify this estimate. 
Unlettered as he was and unpolished, he was still in some 
most important points a gentleman. He was a member of 
a proud and powerful aristocracy, and was distinguished by 
many both of the good and of the bad qualities which belong 

25 to aristocrats. His family pride was beyond that of a 
Talbot or a Howard. He knew the genealogies and coats- 
of-arms of all his neighbors, and could tell which of them 
had assumed supporters without any right, and which of 
them were so unfortunate as to be great-grandsons of alder- 

30 men. He was a magistrate, and, as such, administered 
gratuitously to those who dwelt around him a rude patri- 
archal justice, which, in spite of innumerable blunders and 
of occasional acts of tyranny, was yet better than no justice 
at all. He was an officer of the trainbands, and his military 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 41 

dignity, though it might move the mirth of gallants who had 
served a campaign in Flanders, raised his character in his 
own eyes and in the eyes of his neighbors. Nor indeed 
was his soldiership justly a subject of derision. In every 
county there were elderly gentlemen who had seen service 5 
which was no child's play. One had been knighted by 
Charles the First after the battle of Edgehill. Another still 
wore a patch over the scar which he had received at Naseby. 
A third had defended his old house till Fairfax had blown 
in the door with a petard. The presence of these old Cava- 10 
liers with their old swords and holsters, and with their old 
stories about Goring and Lunsford, gave to the musters of 
militia an earnest and warlike aspect which would otherwise 
have been wanting. Even those country gentlemen who 
were too young to have themselves exchanged blows with 15 
the cuirassiers of the parliament had, from childhood, been 
surrounded by the traces of recent war and fed with stories 
of the martial exploits of their fathers and uncles. Thus the 
character of the English esquire of the seventeenth century 
was compounded of two elements which we are not accus- 20 
tomed to find united. His ignorance and uncouthness, his 
low tastes and gross phrases would, in our time, be consid- 
ered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly ple- 
beian. Yet he was essentially a patrician, and had, in large 
measure, both the virtues and the vices which flourish 25 
among men set from their birth in high place, and accus- 
tomed to authority, to observance, and to self-respect. It 
is not easy for a generation which is accustomed to find 
chivalrous sentiments only in company with liberal studies 
and polished manners to imagine to itself a man with the 3° 
deportment, the vocabulary, and the accent of a carter, yet 
punctilious on matters of genealogy and precedence, and 
ready to risk his life rather than see a stain cast on the 
honor of his house. It is only, however, by thus joining 



42 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

together things seldom or never found together in our own 
experience that we can form a just idea of that rustic aristoc- 
racy which constituted the main strength of the armies of 
Charles the First, and which long supported, with strange 
5 fidelity, the interest of his descendants. 

The gross, uneducated, untraveled country gentleman was 
commonly a Tory, but, though devotedly attached to hered- 
itary monarchy, he had no partiality for courtiers and min- 
isters. He thought, not without reason, that Whitehall was 

io filled with the most corrupt of mankind ; that of the great 
sums which the House of Commons had voted to the crown 
since the Restoration part had been embezzled by cunning 
politicians and part squandered on buffoons and foreign 
courtesans. His stout English heart swelled with indigna- 

15 tion at the thought that the government of his country 
should be subject to French dictation. Being himself gener- 
ally an old Cavalier or the son of an old Cavalier, he 
reflected with bitter resentment on the ingratitude with which 
the Stuarts had requited their best friends. Those who 

20 heard him grumble at the neglect with which he was treated, 
and at the profusion with which wealth was lavished on the 
bastards of Nell Gwynn and Madam Carwell, 50 would have 
supposed him ripe for rebellion. But all this ill humor 
lasted only till the throne was really in danger. It was pre- 

25 cisely when those whom the sovereign had loaded with 
wealth and honors shrank from his side that the country 
gentlemen, so surly and mutinous in the season of his pros- 
perity, rallied round him in a body. Thus, after murmuring 
twenty years at the misgovernment of Charles the Second, 

3° they came to his rescue in his extremity when his own 
secretaries of state and lords of the treasury had deserted 
him, and enabled him to gain a complete victory over the 
opposition ; nor can there be any doubt that they would 
have shown equal loyalty to his brother James, if James 



ENGLAND IN 1686. 43 

would, even at the moment, have refrained from outraging 
their strongest feeling. For there was one institution, and 
one only, which they prized even more then hereditary 
monarchy, and that institution was the Church of England. 
Their love of the Church was not, indeed, the effect of study 5 
or meditation. Few among them could have given any 
reason, drawn from Scripture or ecclesiastical history, for 
adhering to her doctrines, her ritual, and her polity; nor 
were they, as a class, by any means strict observers of that 
code of morality which is common to all Christian sects. 10 
But the experience of many ages proves that men may be 
ready to fight to the death, and to persecute without pity, 
for a religion whose creed they do not understand and 
whose precepts they habitually disobey. <rT 

The rural clergy were even more vehement in Toryism 15 
than the rural gentry, and were a class scarcely less impor- 
tant. It is to be observed, however, that the individual 
clergyman, as compared with the individual gentleman, then 
ranked much lower than in these days. The main support 
of the Church was derived from the tithe ; and the tithe 20 
bore to the rent a much smaller ratio than at present. 
King estimated the whole income of the parochial and 
collegiate clergy at only four hundred and eighty thousand 
pounds a year; Davenant at only five hundred and forty- 
four thousand a year. It is certainly now more than seven 25 
times as great as the larger of these two sums. It follows 
that rectors and vicars must have been, as compared with 
the neighboring knights and squires, much poorer in the 
seventeenth than in the nineteenth century. 

The place of the clergyman in society had been completely 30 
changed by the Reformation. Before that event, ecclesias- 
tics had formed the majority of the House of Lords, had, in 
wealth and splendor, equaled, and sometimes outshone, the 
greatest of the temporal barons, and had generally held 



44 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

the highest civil offices. The lord treasurer was often a 
bishop. The lord chancellor was almost always so. The 
lord keeper of the privy seal and the master of the rolls 
were ordinarily churchmen. Churchmen transacted the 
5 most important diplomatic business. Indeed, almost all 
that large portion of the administration which rude and war- 
like nobles were incompetent to conduct was considered as 
especially belonging to divines. Men, therefore, who were 
averse to the life of camps, and who were, at the same time, 

io desirous to rise in the state, ordinarily received the tonsure. 
Among them were sons of all the most illustrious families, 
and near kinsmen of the throne, Scroops and Nevilles, 
Bourchiers, Staffords, and Poles. To the religious houses 
belonged the rents of immense domains, and all that large 

15 portion of the tithe which is now in the hands of laymen. 
Down to the middle of the reign of Henry the Eighth, 
therefore, no line of life bore so inviting an aspect to ambi- 
tious and covetous natures as the priesthood. Then came 
a violent revolution. The abolition of the monasteries 

20 deprived the Church at once of the greater part of her 
wealth, and of her predominance in the Upper House of 
parliament. There was no longer an abbot of Glaston- 
bury 51 or an abbot of Reading 52 seated among the peers, 
and possessed of revenues equal to those of a powerful earl. 

25 The princely splendor of William of Wykeham 53 and of 
William of Waynfiete 54 had disappeared. The scarlet hat 
of the cardinal, the silver cross of the legate were no more. 
The clergy had also lost the ascendency which is the natural 
reward of superior mental cultivation. Once the circum- 

30 stance that a man could read had raised a presumption that 
he was in orders. But in an age which produced such lay- 
men as William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon, Roger Ascham 
and Thomas Smith, Walter Mildmay and Francis Wal- 
singham, 55 there was no reason for calling away prelates 



ENGLAND IN 1686. 45 

from their dioceses to negotiate treaties, to superintend the 
finances, or to administer justice. The spiritual character 
not only ceased to be a qualification for high civil office, but 
began to be regarded as a disqualification. Those worldly 
motives, therefore, which had formerly induced so many 5 
able, aspiring, and high-born youths to assume the ecclesias- 
tical habit ceased to exist. Not one parish in two hundred 
then afforded what a man of family considered as a mainten- 
ance. There were still indeed prizes in the Church, but they 
were few; and even the highest were mean, when compared 10 
with the glory which had once surrounded the princes of the 
hierarchy. The state kept by Parker and Grindal 5,; seemed 
beggarly to those who remembered the imperial pomp of 
Wolsey, 57 his palaces, which had become the favorite abodes 
of royalty, Whitehall and Hampton Court, the three sumptu- 15 
ous tables daily spread in his hall, the forty-four gorgeous 
copes in his chapel, his running footmen in rich liveries, and 
his body-guards with gilded pole axes. Thus the sacerdotal 
office lost its attraction for the higher classes. During the 
century which followed the accession of Elizabeth, scarce 20 
a single person of noble descent took orders. At the close 
of the reign of Charles the Second, two sons of peers were 
bishops ; four or five sons of peers were priests, and held 
valuable preferment ; but these rare exceptions did not take 
away the reproach which lay on the body. The clergy were 25 
regarded as, on the whole, a plebeian class. And, indeed, 
for one who made the figure of a gentleman, ten were mere 
menial servants. A large proportion of those divines who 
had no benefices, or whose benefices were too small to 
afford a comfortable revenue, lived in the houses of laymen. 30 
It had long been evident that this practice tended to de- 
grade the priestly character. Laud 58 had exerted himself 
to effect a change; and Charles the First had repeatedly 
issued positive orders that none but men of high rank should 



46 ENGLAND / X 1685. 

presume to keep domestic chaplains. Hut these injunctions 
had become obsolete. Indeed, during the domination of the 
Puritans, many of the ejected ministers of the Church of 
England could obtain bread and shelter only by attaching 
5 themselves to the households of royalist gentlemen ; and the 
habits which had been formed in those times of trouble 
continued long after the reestablishment of monarchy and 
episcopacy. In the mansions of men of liberal sentiments 
and cultivated understandings, the chaplain was doubtless 

io treated with urbanity and kindness. His conversation, his 
literary assistance, his spiritual advice were considered as an 
ample return for his food, his lodging, and his stipend. But 
this was not the general feeling of the country gentlemen. 
The coarse and ignorant squire, who thought that it be- 

15 longed to his dignity to have grace said every day at his 
table by an ecclesiastic in full canonicals, found means to 
reconcile dignity with economy. A young Levite — such 
was the phrase then in use — might be had for his board, a 
small garret, and ten pounds a year, and might not only 

20 perform his own professional functions, might not only be 
the most patient of butts and of listeners, might not only 
be always ready in fine weather for bowls, and in rainy 
weather for shovel-board, but might also save the expense 
of a gardener or of a groom. Sometimes the reverend man 

25 nailed up the apricots, and sometimes he curried the coach 
horses. He cast up the farrier's bills. He walked ten 
miles with a message or a parcel. If he was permitted 
to dine with the family, he was expected to content himself 
with the plainest fare. He might fill himself with the corned 

jo beef and the carrots; but as soon as the tarts and cheese- 
cakes made their appearance, he quitted his seat, and stood 
aloof till he was summoned to return thanks for the repast, 
from a great part of which he had been excluded. 

Perhaps after some years of service he was presented to a 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 47 

living sufficient to support him; but he often found it neces- 
sary to purchase his preferment by a species of simony, 
which furnished an inexhaustible subject of pleasantry to 
three or four generations of scoffers. With his cure he was 
expected to take a wife. The wife had ordinarily been in 5 
the patron's service; and it was well if she was not suspected 
of standing too high in the patron's favor. Indeed, the 
nature of the matrimonial connections which the clergymen 
of that age were in the habit of forming is the most certain 
indication of the place which the order held in the social 10 
system. An Oxonian, writing a few months after the death 
of Charles the Second, complained bitterly, not only that 
the country attorney and the country apothecary looked 
down with disdain on the country clergyman, but that one 
of the lessons most earnestly inculcated on every girl of 15 
honorable family was to give no encouragement to a lover 
in orders, and that, if any young lady forgot this precept, 
she was almost as much disgraced as by an illicit amour. 
Clarendon, 59 who assuredly bore no ill will to the Church, 
mentions it as a sign of the confusion of ranks which the 20 
great rebellion had produced, that some damsels of noble 
families had bestowed themselves on divines. A waiting 
woman was generally considered as the most suitable help- 
mate for a parson. Queen Elizabeth, as head of the Church, 
had given what seemed to be a formal sanction to this pre- 25 
judice, by issuing special orders that no clergyman should 
presume to marry a servant girl without the consent of her 
master or mistress. During several generations accordingly 
the relation between priests and handmaidens was a theme 
for endless jest ; nor would it be easy to find, in the comedy 30 
of the seventeenth century, a single instance of a clergy- 
man who wins a spouse above the rank of a cook. Even so 
late as the time of George the Second, the keenest of all 
observers of life and manners, himself a priest, remarked 



48 ENGLAND TN 1686. 

that, in a great household, the chaplain was the resource of 
a lady's maid whose character had been blown upon, and 
who was therefore forced to give up hopes of catching the 
steward. 60 
5 In general the divine who quitted his chaplainship for a 
benefice and a wife found that he had only exchanged one 
class of vexations for another. Not one living in fifty enabled 
the incumbent to bring up a family comfortably. As children 
multiplied and grew, the household of the priest became 

io more and more beggarly. Holes appeared more and more 
plainly in the thatch of his parsonage and in his single cas- 
sock. Often it was only by toiling on his glebe, by feeding 
swine, and by loading dung-carts that he could obtain daily 
bread; nor did his utmost exertions always prevent the 

15 bailiffs from taking his concordance and his inkstand in 
execution. It was a white day on which he was admitted 
into the kitchen of a great house, and regaled by the 
servants with cold meat and ale. His children were 
brought up like the children of the neighboring peasantry. 

20 His boys followed the plough, and his girls went out to 
service. Study he found impossible, for the advowson 
of his living would hardly have sold for a sum suffi- 
cient to purchase a good theological library; and he 
might be considered as unusually lucky if he had ten or 

25 twelve dog-eared volumes among the pots and pans on his 
shelves. Even a keen and strong intellect might be ex- 
pected to rust in so unfavorable a situation. 

Assuredly there was at that time no lack in the English 
Church of ministers distinguished by abilities and learning. 

30 But it is to be observed that these ministers were not scat- 
tered among the rural population. They were brought 
together at a few places where the means of acquiring 
knowledge were abundant, and where the opportunities of 
vigorous intellectual exercise were frequent. At such places 



ENGLAND fA 1685. 49 

were to be found divines qualified by parts, by eloquence, 
by wide knowledge of literature, of science, and of life, to 
defend their Church victoriously against heretics and scep- 
tics, to command the attention of frivolous and worldly con- 
gregations, to guide the deliberations of senates, and to make 5 
religion respectable, even in the most dissolute of courts. 
Some of them labored to fathom the abysses of metaphysical 
theology; some were deeply versed in biblical criticism; and 
some threw light on the darkest parts of ecclesiastical his- 
tory. Some proved themselves consummate masters of logic. 10 
Some cultivated rhetoric with such assiduity and success that 
their discourses are still justly valued as models of style. 
These eminent men were to be found, with scarce a single 
exception, at the universities, at the great cathedrals, or in 
the capital. Barrow had lately died at Cambridge, and 15 
Pearson had gone thence to the episcopal bench. Cudworth 
and Henry More were still living there. South and Pococke, 
Jane and Aldrich were at Oxford. Prideaux was in the 
close of Norwich, and Whitby in the close of Salisbury. But 
it was chiefly by the London clergy, who were always spoken 20 
of as a class apart, that the fame of their profession for 
learning and eloquence was upheld. The principal pulpits 
of the metropolis were occupied about this time by a crowd 
of distinguished men, from among whom was selected a large 
proportion of the rulers of the Church. Sherlock preached 25 
at the Temple, Tillotson at Lincoln's Inn, Wake and Jeremy 
Collier at Gray's Inn, Burnet at the Rolls, Stillingfleet at 
St. Paul's Cathedral, Patrick at St. Paul's, Covent Garden, 
Fowler at St. Giles's, Cripplegate, Sharp at St. Giles's in the 
Field's, Tennison at St. Martin's, Sprat at St. Margaret's, 30 
Beveridge at St. Peter's in Cornhill. Of these twelve men, 
all of high note in ecclesiastical history, ten became bishops 
and four archbishops. Meanwhile almost the only important 
theological works which came forth from a rural parsonage 



50 ENGLAND IX 1686. 

were those of George Bull, afterwards Bishop of St. David's; 
and Dull would never have produced those works had he 
not inherited an estate, by the sale of which he was enabled 
to collect a library, such as probably no other country clergy- 
5 man in England possessed. 

Thus the Anglican priesthood was divided into two sec- 
tions, which, in acquirements, in manners, and in social 
position, differed widely from each other. One section, trained 
for cities and courts, comprised men familiar with all ancient 

io and modern learning; men able to encounter Hobbes or 
Bossuet 61 at all the weapons of controversy; men who could, 
in their sermons, set forth the majesty and beauty of Chris- 
tianity with such justness of thought and such energy of 
language that the indolent Charles roused himself to listen, 

*5 and the fastidious Buckingham 6 ' 2 forgot to sneer; men whose 
address, politeness, and knowledge of the world qualified 
them to manage the consciences of the wealthy and noble; 
men with whom Halifax ° 3 loved to discuss the interests of 
empires, and from whom Dryden was not ashamed to own 

20 that he had learned to write. * The other section was des- 
tined to ruder and humbler service. It was dispersed over 
the country, and consisted chiefly of persons not at all 
wealthier, and not much more refined, than small farmers or 
upper servants. Yet it was in these rustic priests, who 

25 derived but a scanty subsistenee from their tithe sheaves 
and tithe pigs, and who had not the smallest chance of ever 
attaining high professional honors, that the professional 
spirit was strongest. Among those divines who were the 
boast of the universities and the delight of the capital, and 

30 who had attamed, or might reasonably expect to attain, 

* " I have frequently heard him (Dryden) own with pleasure that, if 
he had any talent for English prose, it was owing to his having often 
read the writings of the great Archbishop Tillotson." Congreve's 
Dedication of Dryden's Tlays. 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 51 

opulence and lordly rank, a party, respectable in numbers, 
and more respectable in character, leaned towards constitu- 
tional principles of government, lived on friendly terms with 
Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, would gladly have 
seen a full toleration granted to all Protestant sects, and 5 
would even have consented to make alterations in the. liturgy, 
for the purpose of conciliating honest and candid Non-con- 
formists. But such latitudinarianism was held in horror by 
the country parson. He was, indeed, prouder of his ragged 
gown than his superiors of their lawn and of their scarlet 10 
hoods. 04 The very consciousness that there was little in his 
worldly circumstances to distinguish him from the villagers 
to whom he preached led him to hold immoderately high the 
dignity of that sacerdotal office which was his single title to 
reverence. Having lived in seclusion, and having had little 15 
opportunity of correcting his opinions by reading or con- 
versation, he held and taught the doctrines of indefeasible 
hereditary right, of passive obedience, and of non-resistance, 
in all their crude absurdity. Having been long engaged in 
a petty war against the neighboring dissenters, he too often 20 
hated them for the wrongs which he had done them, and 
found no fault with the Five-Mile Act and the Conventicle 
Act, 65 except that those odious laws had not a sharper edge. 
Whatever influence his office gave him was exerted with pas- 
sionate zeal on the Tory side; and that influence was immense. 25 
It would be a great error to imagine, because the country 
rector was in general not regarded as a gentleman, because 
he could not dare to aspire to the hand of one of the young 
ladies at the manor house, because he was not asked into the 
parlors of the great, but was left to drink and smoke with 30 
grooms and butlers, that the power of the clerical body was 
smaller than at present. The influence of a class is by no 
means proportioned to the consideration which the members 
of that class enjoy in their individual capacity. A cardinal 



52 ENGLAND tN 1685. 

is a much more exalted personage than a begging friar; but 
it would be a grievous mistake to suppose that the College 
of Cardinals has exercised a greater dominion over the 
public mind of Europe than the order of Saint Francis. 
5 In Ireland, at present, a peer holds a far higher station 
in society than a Roman Catholic priest; yet there are in 
Munster and Connaught few counties where a combination 
of priests would not carry an election against a combination 
of peers. In the seventeenth century the pulpit was to a 

io large portion of the population what the periodical press now 
is. Scarce any of the clowns who came to the parish church 
ever saw a gazette or a political pamphlet. Ill informed as 
their spiritual pastor might be, he was yet better informed 
than themselves ; he had every week an opportunity of 

15 haranguing them; and his harangues were never answered. 
At every important conjuncture, invectives against the Whigs 
and exhortations to obey the Lord's Anointed resounded at 
once from many thousands of pulpits; and the effect was for- 
midable indeed. Of all the causes which, after the dissolution 

20 of the Oxford parliament, produced the violent reaction 
against the Exclusionists, 66 the most potent seems to have 
been the oratory of the country clergy. 

The power which the country gentlemen and the country 
clergymen exercised in the rural districts was in some meas- 

25 ure counterbalanced by the power of the yeomanry, an emi- 
nently manly and true-hearted race. The petty proprietors 
who cultivated their own fields and enjoyed a modest compe- 
tence, without affecting to have scutcheons and crests, or 
aspiring to sit on the bench of justice, then formed a much 

30 more important part of the nation than at present. If we 
may trust the best statistical writers of that age, not less 
than a hundred and sixty thousand proprietors, who, with 
their families, must have made up more than a seventh of 
the whole population, derived their subsistence from little 



ENGLAM) IN 1685. 5j 

freehold estates. The average income of these small land- 
owners was estimated at between sixty and seventy pounds 
a year. It was computed that the number of persons who 
occupied their own land was greater than the number of 
those who farmed the land of others. A large portion of the 5 
yeomanry had, from the time of the Reformation, leaned 
towards Puritanism, had, in the Civil War, taken the side 
of the parliament, had, after the Restoration, persisted in 
hearing Presbyterian and Independent preachers, had, at 
elections, strenuously supported the Exclusionists, and had 10 
continued, even after the discovery of the Rye House Plot 
and the proscription of the Whig leaders, to regard Popery 
and arbitrary power with unmitigated hostility. 

Great as has been the change in the rural life of England 
since the Revolution, the change which has come to pass in 15 
the cities is still more amazing. At present a sixth part of 
the nation is crowded into provincial towns of more than 
thirty thousand inhabitants. In the reign of Charles the 
Second no provincial town in the kingdom contained thirty 
thousand inhabitants, and only four provincial towns con- 20 
tained so many as ten thousand inhabitants. 

Next to the capital, but next at an immense distance, 
stood Bristol, then the first English seaport, and Norwich, 
then the first English manufacturing town. Both have since 
that time been far outstripped by younger rivals ; yet both 25 
have made great positive advances. The population of 
Bristol has quadrupled. The population of Norwich has 
more than doubled. 

Pepys, who visited Bristol eight years after the Restora- 
tion, was struck by the splendor of the city. But his stan- 3° 
dard was not high ; for he noted down as a wonder the 
circumstance that, in Bristol, a man might look round him 
and see nothing but houses. It seems that, in no other 
place with which he was acquainted, except London, did 



54 ENGLAND IX 1685. 

the buildings completely shut out the woods and fields. 
Large as Bristol might then appear, it occupied but a very 
small portion of the area on which it now stands. A few 
churches of eminent beauty rose out of a labyrinth of 
5 narrow lanes built upon vaults of no great solidity. If a 
coach or a cart entered these alleys, there was danger that 
it would be wedged between the houses, and danger also 
that it would break in the cellars. Goods were, therefore, 
conveyed about the town almost exclusively in trucks drawn 

io by dogs ; and the richest inhabitants exhibited their wealth, 
not by riding in gilded carriages, but by walking the streets 
with trains of servants in rich liveries, and by keeping 
tables loaded with good cheer. The pomp of the christen- 
ings and burials far exceeded what was seen at any other 

15 place in England. The hospitality of the city was widely 
renowned, and especially the collations with which the sugar 
refiners regaled their visitors. The repast was dressed in 
the furnace, and was accompanied by a rich brewage made 
of the best Spanish wine, and celebrated over the whole 

20 kingdom as Bristol milk. This luxury was supported by a 
thriving trade with the North American plantations and 
with the West Indies. The passion for colonial traffic was 
so strong that there was scarce a small shopkeeper in 
Bristol who had not a venture on board of some ship bound 

25 for Virginia or the Antilles. Some of these ventures in- 
deed were not of the most honorable kind. There was, in 
the Transatlantic possessions of the crown, a great demand 
for labor, and this demand was partly supplied by a system 
of crimping and kidnapping at the principal English sea- 

3° ports. 07 Nowhere was this system found in such active and 
extensive operation as at Bristol. Even the first magistrates 
of that city were not ashamed to enrich themselves by so 
odious a commerce. The number of houses in the city 
appears, from the returns of the hearth money, to have 



ENGLAND JX 1685. 55 

been, in the year 1685, just five thousand three hundred. 
We can hardly suppose the number of persons in a house 
to have been greater than in the city of London; and in the 
city of London we learn from the best authority that there 
were then fifty-five persons to ten houses. The population of 5 
Bristol must therefore have been twenty-nine thousand souls. 
Norwich was the capital of a large and fruitful province. 
It was the residence of a bishop and of a chapter. It was 
the chief seat of the chief manufacture of the realm. Some 
men distinguished by learning and science had recently 10 
dwelt there, and no place in the kingdom, except the capi- 
tal and the universities, had more attractions for the curi- 
ous. The library, the museum, the aviary, and the botani- 
cal garden of Sir Thomas Browne were thought by Fellows 
of the Royal Society well worthy of a long pilgrimage. 15 
Norwich had also a court in miniature. In the heart of the 
city stood an old palace of the Dukes of Norfolk, said to be 
the largest town house in the kingdom out of London. In 
this mansion, to which were annexed a tennis court, a bowl- 
ing green, and a wilderness stretching along the bank of the 20 
Wansum, the noble family of Howard frequently resided, 
and kept a state resembling that of petty sovereigns. 
Drink was served to guests in goblets of pure gold. The 
very tongs and shovels were of silver. Pictures by Italian 
masters adorned the walls. The cabinets were filled with a 25 
fine collection of gems purchased by that Earl of Arundel 
whose marbles are now among the ornaments of Oxford. 
Here, in the year 167 1, Charles and his court were sumptu- 
ously entertained. Here, too, all comers were annually 
welcomed from Christmas to Twelfth Night. Ale flowed in 30 
oceans for the populace. Three coaches, one of which had 
been built at a cost of five hundred pounds, to contain four- 
teen persons, were sent every afternoon round the city to 
bring ladies to the festivities, and the dances were always 



56 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

followed by a luxurious banquet. When the Duke of Nor- 
folk came to Norwich, he was greeted like a king returning 
to his capital. The bells of the cathedral and of Saint 
Peter Mancroft were rung. The guns of the castle were 
5 fired, and the mayor and aldermen waited on their illustri- 
ous fellow-citizen with complimentary addresses. In the 
year 1693, the population of Norwich was found by actual 
enumeration to be between twenty-eight and twenty-nine 
thousand souls. 

'o Far below Norwich, but still high in dignity and impor- 
tance, were some other ancient capitals of shires. In that 
age it was seldom that a country gentleman went up with 
his family to London. The county town was his metropolis. 
He sometimes made it his residence during part of the 

15 year. At all events, he was often attracted thither by busi- 
ness and pleasure, by assizes, quarter sessions, elections, 
musters of militia, festivals, and races. There were the 
halls where the judges, robed in scarlet and escorted by 
javelins and trumpets, opened the king's commission twice 

20 a year. There were the markets at which the corn, the 
cattle, the wool, and the hops of the surrounding country 
were exposed to sale. There were the great fairs to which 
merchants came down from London, and where the rural 
dealer laid in his annual stores of sugar, stationery, cutlery, 

25 and muslin. There were the shops at which the best fami- 
lies of the neighborhood bought grocery and millinery. 
Some of these places derived dignity from interesting his- 
torical recollections, from cathedrals decorated by all the 
art and magnificence of the middle ages, from palaces where 

30 a long succession of prelates had dwelt, from closes sur- 
rounded by the venerable abodes of deans and canons, and 
from castles which had in the old time repelled the Nevilles 
or De Veres, and which bore more recent traces of the 
vengeance of Rupert or of Cromwell. 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 57 

Conspicuous among these interesting cities were York, 
the capital of the north, and Exeter, the capital of the west. 
Neither can have contained much more than ten thousand 
inhabitants. Worcester, the queen of the cider land, had 
about eight thousand ; Nottingham probably as many. 5 
Gloucester, renowned for that resolute defence which had 
been fatal to Charles the First, had certainly between 
four and five thousand ; Derby not quite four thousand. 
Shrewsbury was the chief place of an extensive and fertile 
district. The court of the marches of Wales was held 10 
there. In the language of the gentry many miles round the 
Wrekin, to go to Shrewsbury was to go to town. The pro- 
vincial wits and beauties imitated, as well as they could, 
the fashions of Saint James's Park, in the walks along the 
side of the Severn. The inhabitants were about seven 15 
thousand. 

The population of every one of these places has, since 
the Revolution, much more than doubled. The population 
of some has multiplied sevenfold. The streets have been 
almost entirely rebuilt. Slate has succeeded to thatch and 20 
brick to timber. The pavements and the lamps, the dis- 
play of wealth in the principal shops, and the luxurious 
neatness of the dwellings occupied by the gentry would, in 
the seventeeth century, have seemed miraculous. Yet is 
the relative importance of the old capitals of counties by no 25 
means what it was. Younger towns, towns which are rarely 
or never mentioned in our early history, and which sent no 
representatives to our early parliaments, have, within the 
memory of persons still living, grown to a greatness which 
this generation contemplates with wonder and pride, not 30 
unaccompanied by awe and anxiety. 

The most eminent of these towns were indeed known in 
the seventeenth century as respectable seats of industry. 
Nay, their rapid progress and their vast opulence were then 



58 ENGLAND IX 1685. 

sometimes described in language which seems ludicrous to a 
man who has seen their present grandeur. One of the 
most populous and prosperous among them was Man- 
chester. It had been required by the Protector to send one 
5 representative to his parliament, and was mentioned by 
writers of the time of Charles the Second as a busy and 
opulent place. Cotton had, during half a century, been 
brought thither from Cyprus and Smyrna, but the manufac- 
ture was in its infancy. Whitney 68 had not yet taught how 

io the raw material might be furnished in quantities almost 
fabulous. Arkwright had not yet taught how it might be 
worked up with a speed and precision which seem magical. 
The whole annual import did not, at the end of the seven- 
teenth century, amount to two millions of pounds, a 

15 quantity which would now hardly supply the demand of 
forty-eight hours. That wonderful emporium, which in 
population and wealth far surpasses capitals so much 
renowned as Berlin, Madrid, and Lisbon, was then a mean 
and ill-built market town, containing under six thousand 

20 people. It then had not a single press. It now supports a 
hundred printing establishments. It then had not a single 
coach. It now supports twenty coachmakers. 

Leeds was already the chief seat of the woolen manufac- 
tures of Yorkshire, but the elderly inhabitants could still 

25 remember the time when the first brick house, then and 
long after called the Red House, was built. They boasted 
loudly of their increasing wealth, and of the immense sales 
of cloth which took place in the open air on the bridge. 
Hundreds, nay, thousands of pounds had been paid down in 

3° the course of one busy market day. The rising importance 
of Leeds had attracted the notice of successive govern- 
ments. Charles the First had granted municipal privileges 
to the town. Oliver had invited it to send one member 
to the House of Commons. But from the returns of the 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 59 

hearth money it seems certain that the whole population of 
the borough, an extensive district which contains many ham- 
lets, did not, in the reign of Charles the Second, exceed 
seven thousand souls. In 1841 there were more than a 
hundred and fifty thousand. 5 

About a day's journey south of Leeds, on the verge of a 
wild moorland tract, lay an ancient manor, now rich with 
cultivation, then barren and unenclosed, which was known 
by the name of Hallamshire. Iron abounded there, and 
from a very early period, the rude whittles 09 fabricated 10 
there had been sold all over the kingdom. They had 
indeed been mentioned by Geoffrey Chaucer 70 in one of 
his Canterbury Tales. But the manufacture appears to 
have made little progress during the three centuries which 
followed his time. This languor may perhaps be explained 15 
by the fact that the trade was, during almost the whole of 
this long period, subject to such regulations as the lord and 
his court-leet thought fit to impose. The more delicate kinds 
of cutlery were either made in the capital or brought from 
the Continent. It was not indeed till the reign of George 20 
the First that the English surgeons ceased to import from 
France those exquisitely fine blades which are required for 
operations on the human frame. Most of the Hallamshire 
forges were collected in a market town which had sprung 
up near the castle of the proprietor, and which, in the reign 25 
of James the First, had been a singularly miserable place, 
containing about two thousand inhabitants, of whom a third 
were half-starved and half-naked beggars. It seems certain 
from the parochial registers that the population did not 
amount to four thousand at the end of the reign of Charles 30 
the Second. The effects of a species of toil singularly un- 
favorable to the health and vigor of the human frame were 
at once discerned by every traveler. A large proportion 
of the people had distorted limbs. That is that Sheffield 



60 ENGLAND IN 16S5. 

which mow, with its dependencies, contains a hundred and 
twenty thousand souls, and which sends forth its admirable 
knives, razors, and lancets to the farthest ends of the 
world. 
5 Birmingham had not been thought of sufficient importance 
to send a member to Oliver's parliament. Yet the manufac- 
turers of Birmingham were already a busy and thriving race. 
They boasted that their hardware was highly esteemed, not 
indeed, as now, at Pekin and Lima, at Bokhara and Timbuc- 

io too, but in London and even as far off as Ireland. They had 
acquired a less honorable renown as coiners of bad money. 
In allusion to their spurious groats, the Troy party had fixed 
on demagogues who hypocritically affected zeal against 
Popery, the nickname of Birminghams. Yet in 1685 the 

15 population, which is now little less than two hundred thou- 
sand, did not amount to four thousand. Birmingham buttons 
were just beginning to be known ; of Birmingham guns 
nobody had yet heard; and the place whence, two genera- 
tions later, the magnificent editions of Baskerville went 

20 forth to astonish all the librarians of Europe, did not contain 
a single regular shop where a Bible or an almanac could be 
bought. On market days a bookseller named Michael John- 
son, the father of the great Samuel Johnson, 71 came over 
from Lichfield, and opened a stall during a few hours. 

25 This supply of literature was long found adequate to the 
demand. 

These four chief seats of our great manufactures deserve 
especial mention. It would be tedious to enumerate all the 
populous and opulent hives of industry which, a hundred 

30 and fifty years ago, were hamlets without a parish church, 
or desolate moors, inhabited only by grouse and wild deer. 
Nor has the change been less signal in those outlets by 
which the products of the English looms and forges are 
poured forth over the four quarters of the world. At present 






ENGLAND IN 1685. 61 

Liverpool contains about three hundred thousand inhabi- 
tants. The shipping registered at her port amounts to 
between four and five hundred thousand tons. Into her 
custom-house has been repeatedly paid in one year a sum 
more than thrice as great as the whole income of the Eng- 5 
lish crown in 1685. The receipts of her post office, even 
since the great reduction of the duty, exceed the sum which 
the postage of the whole kingdom yielded to the Duke of 
York. 7 " 2 Her endless docks and warehouses are among the 
wonders of the world. Yet even those docks and ware- 10 
houses seem hardly to suffice for the gigantic trade of the 
Mersey ; and already a rival city is growing fast on the 
opposite shore. In the days of Charles the Second, Liver- 
pool was described as a rising town which had recently made 
great advances, and which maintained a profitable inter- 15 
course with Ireland and with the sugar colonies. The 
customs had multiplied eightfold within sixteen years, and 
amounted to what was then considered the immense sum 
of fifteen thousand pounds annually. But the population 
can hardly have exceeded four thousand. The shipping 20 
was about fourteen hundred tons, less than the tonnage of a 
single modern Indiaman of the first class ; and the whole 
number of seamen belonging to the port cannot be esti- 
mated at more than two hundred. 

Such has been the progress of those towns where wealth 25 
is created and accumulated. Not less rapid has been the 
progress of towns of a very different kind, towns in which 
wealth, created and accumulated elsewhere, is expended for 
purposes of health and recreation. Some of the most re- 
markable of these towns have sprung into existence since 3 C 
the time of the Stuarts. Cheltenham is now a greater city 
than any which the kingdom contained in the seventeenth 
century, London alone excepted. But in the seventeenth 
century, and at the beginning of the eighteenth, Cheltenham 



62 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

was mentioned by local historians merely as a rural parish 
lying under the Cotswold Hills, and affording good ground, 
both for tillage and pasture. Corn grew and cattle browsed 
over the space now covered by that gay succession of streets 
5 and villas. Brighton was described as a place which had 
once been thriving, which had possessed many small fishing 
barks, and which had, when at the height of prosperity, con- 
tained above two thousand inhabitants, but which was sink- 
ing fast into decay. The sea was gradually gaining on the 

io buildings, which at length almost entirely disappeared. 
Ninety years ago the ruins of an old fort were to be seen 
lying among the pebbles and seaweed on the beach; and 
ancient men could still point out the traces of foundations 
on a spot where a street of more than a hundred huts had 

15 been swallowed up by the waves. So desolate was the place 
after this calamity that the vicarage was thought scarcely 
worth having. A few poor fishermen, however, still continued 
to dry their nets on those cliffs, on which now a town more 
than twice as large and populous as the Bristol of the Stuarts 

20 presents mile after mile its gay and fantastic front to the sea. 

England, however, was not, in the seventeenth century, 

destitute of watering places. The gentry of Derbyshire and 

of the neighboring counties repaired to Buxton, where they 

were crowded into low wooden sheds, and regaled with oat- 

25 cake, and with a viand which the hosts called mutton, but 
which the guests strongly suspected to be dog. Tunbridge 
Wells, 73 lying within a day's journey of the capital, and in 
one of the richest and most highly civilized parts of the king- 
dom, had much greater attractions. At present we see there 

30 a town which would, a hundred and sixty years ago, have 
ranked, in population, fourth or fifth among the towns of 
England. The brilliancy of the shops and the luxury of the 
private dwellings far surpass anything that England could 
then show. When the court, soon after the Restoration, 



ENGLAND IN 1686. 63 

visited Tunbridge Wells, there was no town there ; but, 
within a mile of the spring, rustic cottages, somewhat cleaner 
and neater than the ordinary cottages of that time, were 
scattered over the heath. Some of these cabins were mov- 
able, and were carried on sledges from one part of the com- 5 
mon to another. To these huts men of fashion, wearied 
with the din and smoke of London, sometimes came in the 
summer to breathe fresh air, and to catch a glimpse of rural 
life. During the season a kind of fair was daily held near 
the fountain. The wives and daughters of the Kentish 10 
farmers came from the neighboring villages with cream, 
cherries, wheat-ears, and quails. To chaffer with them, to 
flirt with them, to praise their straw hats and tight heels was a 
refreshing pastime to voluptuaries sick of the airs of actresses 
and maids of honor. Milliners, toymen, and jewellers came 15 
down from London and opened a bazar under the trees. In 
one booth the politician might find his coffee and the Lon- 
don Gazette ; in another were gamblers playing deep at bas- 
set 74 ; and, on fine evenings, the fiddles were in attendance, 
and there were morris dances 75 on the elastic turf of the 20 
bowling green. In 1685 a subscription had just been raised 
among those who frequented the wells for building a church, 
which the Tories, who then domineered everywhere, insisted 
on dedicating to Saint Charles the Martyr. 

But at the head of the English watering places, without a 25 
rival, was Bath. The springs of that city had been renowned 
from the days of the Romans. It had been, during many 
centuries, the seat of a bishop. The sick repaired thither 
from every part of the realm. The king sometimes held his 
court there. Nevertheless, Bath was then a maze of only 3° 
four or five hundred houses, crowded within an old wall in 
the vicinity of the Avon. Pictures of what were considered 
as the finest of those houses are still extant, and greatly 
resemble the lowest rag shops and pothouses of Radcliffe 



64 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

Highway. Even then, indeed, travelers complained of the 
narrowness and meanness of the streets. That beautiful city, 
which charms even eyes familiar with the masterpieces of 
Bramante and Palladio,™ and which the genius of Anstey and 

5 of Smollett, of Frances Burney and of Jane Austen," has 
made classic ground, had not begun to exist. Milsom Street 
itself was an open field lying far beyond the walls; and 
hedgerows intersected the space which is now covered by 
the Crescent and the Circus. As to the comforts and lux- 

io uries which were to be found in the interior of the houses of 
Bath by the fashionable visitors who resorted thither in search 
of health or amusement, we possess information more com- 
plete and minute than can generally be obtained on such 
subjects. A writer who published an account of that city 

15 about sixty years after the Revolution has accurately de- 
scribed the changes which had taken place within his own 
recollection. He assures us that in his younger days the 
gentlemen who visited the springs slept in rooms hardly as 
good as the garrets which he lived to see occupied by foot- 

20 men. The floors of the dining-rooms were uncarpeted, and 
were colored brown with a wash made of soot and small 
beer, in order to hide the dirt. Not a wainscot was painted. 
Not a hearth or chimney-piece was of marble. A slab of 
common freestone and fire irons which had cost from three 

25 to four shillings were thought sufficient for any fireplace. 
The best apartments were hung with coarse woolen stuff, 
and were furnished with rush-bottomed chairs. Readers who 
take an interest in the progress of civilization and of tin- 
useful arts will be grateful to the humble topographer who 

30 has recorded these facts, and will perhaps wish that histo- 
rians of far higher pretensions had sometimes spared a few 
pages from military evolutions and political intrigues for the 
purpose of letting us know how the parlors and bedchambers 
of our ancestors looked. 






ENGLAND IN 1GS5. 65 

The position of London, relatively to the other towns of 
the empire, was, in the time of Charles the Second, far higher 
than at present. For at present the population of London is 
little more than six times the population of Manchester or of 
Liverpool. In the days of Charles the Second the population 5 
of London was more than seventeen times the population of 
Bristol or of Norwich. It may be doubted whether any other 
instance can be mentioned of a great kingdom in which the 
first city was more than seventeen times as large as the 
second. There is reason to believe that, in 1685, London 10 
had been, during about half a century, the most populous 
capital in Europe. The inhabitants, who are now at least 
nineteen hundred thousand, were then probably a little more 
than half a million.* London had in the world only one 
commercial rival, now long outstripped, the mighty and 15 
opulent Amsterdam. English writers boasted of the forest 
of masts and yard arms which covered the river from the 
bridge to the Tower, and of the incredible sums which were 
collected at the Custom- House in Thames Street. There is, 
indeed, no doubt that the trade of the metropolis then bore 20 
a far greater proportion than at present to the whole trade 
of the country; yet to our generation the honest vaunting of 
our ancestors must appear almost ludicrous. The shipping 
which they thought incredibly great appears not to have 
exceeded seventy thousand tons. This was, indeed, then 25 
more than a third of the whole tonnage of the kingdom, but 
is now less than a fourth of the tonnage of Newcastle, and 
is nearly equaled by the tonnage of the steam vessels of the 
Thames. The customs of London amounted, in 1685, to 
about three hundred and thirty thousand pounds a year. In 3° 
our time the net duty paid annually, at the same place, 
exceeds ten millions. f 

* According to King, 530,000. 

! Macpherson's History of Commerce. Chalmers's estimate. Cham- 



66 ENGLAND TN 1688. 

Whoever examines the maps of London which were pub- 
lished towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second 
will see that only the nucleus of the present capital then 
existed. The town did not, as now, fade by imperceptible 
5 degrees into the country. No long avenues of villas, em- 
bowered in lilacs and laburnums, extended from the great 
center of wealth and civilization almost to the boundaries of 
Middlesex and far into the heart of Kent and Surrey. In the 
east, no part of the immense line of warehouses and artificial 

io lakes which now spreads from the Tower to Blackwall had 
even been projected. On the west, scarcely one of those 
stately piles of building which are inhabited by the noble 
and wealthy was in existence ; and Chelsea, which is now 
peopled by more than forty thousand human beings, was a 

15 quiet country village with scarce a thousand inhabitants. 
On the north, cattle fed and sportsmen wandered with dogs 
and guns over the site of the borough of Marylebone, and 
over far the greater part of the space now covered by the 
boroughs of Finsbury and of the Tower Hamlets. Islington 

20 was almost a solitude; and poets loved to contrast its silence 
and repose with the din and turmoil of the monster London. 
On the south, the capital is now connected with its suburb 
by several bridges, not inferior in magnificence and solidity 
to the noblest works of the Caesars. In 1685 a single line 

25 of irregular arches, overhung by piles of mean and crazy 
houses, and garnished after a fashion worthy of the naked 
barbarians of Dahomy, with scores of mouldering heads, 
impeded the navigation of the river. 

Of the metropolis, the City, properly so called, was the 

30 most important division. At the time of the Restoration it 

berlayne's State of England, 1684. The tonnage of the steamers 
belonging to the port of London was, at the end of 1847, about 60,000 
tons. The customs of the port, from 1842 to 1S4 5, very nearly averaged 
£\ 1,000,000. 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 67 

had been built, for the most part, of wood and plaster ; the 
few bricks that were used were ill baked ; the booths where 
goods were exposed to sale projected far into the streets, 
and were overhung by the upper stories. A few specimens 
of this architecture may still be seen in those districts which 5 
were not reached by the great tire. That fire had, in a few 
days, covered a space of little less than a square mile with 
the ruins of eighty-nine churches and of thirteen thousand 
houses. But the city had risen again with a celerity which 
had excited the admiration of neighboring countries. Unfor- 10 
tunately, the old lines of the streets had been to a great 
extent preserved; and those lines, originally traced in an age 
when even princesses performed their journeys on horseback, 
were often too narrow to allow wheeled carriages to pass 
each other with ease, and were therefore ill adapted for the 15 
residence of wealthy persons in an age when a coach and six 
was a fashionable luxury. The style of building was, how- 
ever, far superior to that of the city which had perished. 
The ordinary material was brick, of much better quality than 
had formerly been used. On the sites of the ancient parish 20 
churches had arisen a multitude of new domes, towers, and 
spires which bore the mark of the fertile genius of Wren. 
In every place save one the traces of the great devastation 
had been completely effaced. But the crowds of workmen, 
the scaffolds, and the masses of hewn stone were still to be 25 
seen where the noblest of Protestant temples was slowly 
rising on the ruins of the old cathedral of St. Paul. 

The whole character of the City has, since that time, 
undergone a complete change. At present#the bankers, the 
merchants, and the chief shopkeepers repair thither on six 30 
mornings of every week for the transaction of business ; but 
they reside in other quarters of the metropolis, or at suburban 
country-seats surrounded by shrubberies and flower gardens. 
This revolution in private habits has produced a political 



6S ENGLAND IN / 

revolution of no small importance. The City is no longer 
regarded by the wealthiest traders with that attachment which 
every man naturally feels for his home. It is no longer 
associated in their minds with domestic affections and 
5 endearments. The fireside, the nursery, the social table, 
the quiet bed are not there. Lombard Street and Thread- 
needle Street are merely places where men toil and accumu- 
late. They go elsewhere to enjoy and to expend. On a 
Sunday or in an evening after the hours of business, some 

10 courts and alleys, which a few hours before had been alive 
with hurrying feet and anxious faces, are as silent as a coun- 
try churchyard. The chiefs of the mercantile interest are 
no longer citizens. They avoid, they almost contemn, munici- 
pal honors and duties. Those honors and duties are aban- 

15 doned to men who, though useful and highly respectable, 
seldom belong to the princely commercial houses of which 
the names are held in honor throughout the world. 

In the seventeenth century the City was the merchant's 
residence. Those mansions of the great old burghers which 

20 still exist have been turned into counting-houses and ware- 
houses ; but it is evident that they were originally not inferior 
in magnificence to the dwellings which were then inhabited 
by the nobility. They sometimes stand in retired and gloomy 
courts, and are accessible only by inconvenient passages; but 

25 their dimensions are ample and their aspect stately. The 
entrances are decorated with richly carved pillars and can- 
opies. The staircases and landing-places are not wanting in 
grandeur. The floors are sometimes of wood, tessellated 
after the fashion of France. The palace of Sir Robert 

30 Clayton, in the Old Jewry, contained a superb banqueting 
room wainscoted with cedar and adorned with battles of 
gods and giants in fresco. Sir Dudley North expended four 
thousand pounds, a sum which would then have been impor- 
tant to a duke, on the rich furniture of his reception rooms 



ENGLAND IN 1686 69 

in Basinghall Street. In such abodes, under the last Stuarts, 
the heads of the great firms lived splendidly and hospitably. 
To their dwelling-place they were bound by the strongest 
ties of interest and affection. There they had passed their 
youth, had made their friendships, had courted their wives, 5 
had seen their children grow up, had laid the remains of their 
parents in the earth, and expected that their own remains 
would be laid. That intense patriotism which is peculiar to 
the members of societies congregated within a narrow space 
was, in such circumstances, strongly developed. London 10 
was, to the Londoner, what Athens was to the Athenian of 
the age of Pericles, what Florence was to the Florentine 
of the fifteenth century. The citizen was proud of the 
grandeur of his city, punctilious about her claims to respect, 
ambitious of her offices, and zealous for her franchises. 15 

At the close of the reign of Charles the Second the pride 
of the Londoners was smarting from a cruel mortification. 
The old charter had been taken away, and the magistracy 
had been remodelled. All the civic functionaries were 
Tories ; and the Whigs, though in numbers and in wealth 20 
superior to their opponents, found themselves excluded from 
every local dignity. Nevertheless, the external splendor of 
the municipal government was not diminished, nay, was 
rather increased by this change. For, under the adminis- 
tration of some Puritans who had lately borne rule, the 25 
ancient fame of the City for good cheer had declined ; but 
under the new magistrates, who belonged to a more festive 
party, and at whose boards guests of rank and fashion from 
beyond Temple Bar were often seen, the Guildhall and the 
halls of the great companies were enlivened by many sump- 30 
tuous banquets. During these repasts, odes, composed by 
the poet laureate of the corporation, in praise of the king, 
the duke, and the mayor, were sung to music. The drinking 
was deep, the shouting loud. An observant Tory, who had 



70 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

often shared in these revels, has remarked that the practice 
of huzzaing after drinking healths dates from this joyous 
period. 

The magnificence displayed by the first civic magistrate 
5 was almost regal. The gilded coach, indeed, which is now 
annually admired by the crowd, was not yet a part of his 
state. On great occasions he appeared on horseback, at- 
tended by a long cavalcade inferior in magnificence only to 
that which, before a coronation, escorted the sovereign from 

io the Tower to Westminster. The Lord Mayor was never 
seen in public without his rich robe, his hood of black velvet, 
his gold chain, his jewel, and a great attendance of har- 
bingers and guards. Nor did the world find anything ludi- 
crous in the pomp which constantly surrounded him. For 

15 it was not more than proportioned to the place which, as 
wielding the strength and representing the dignity of the city 
of London, he was entitled to occupy in the state. That 
city, being then not only without equal in the country, but 
without second, had, during five and forty years, exercised 

20 almost as great an influence on the politics of England as 
Paris has, in our own time, exercised on the politics of 
France. In intelligence London was greatly in advance of 
every other part of the kingdom. A government, supported 
and trusted by London, could in a day obtain such pecuniary 

25 means as it would have taken months to collect from the rest 
of the island. Nor were the military resources of the capital 
to be despised. The power which the lord lieutenants exer- 
cised in other parts of the kingdom was in London intrusted 
to a commission of eminent citizens. Under the orders of 

30 this commission were twelve regiments of foot and two regi- 
ments of horse. An army of drapers' apprentices and jour- 
neymen tailors, with common councilmen for captains and 
aldermen for colonels, might not indeed have been able to 
stand its ground against regular troops; but there were then 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 71 

very few regular troops in the kingdom. A town, therefore, 
which could send forth, at an hour's notice, twenty thousand 
men, abounding in natural courage, provided with tolerable 
weapons, and not altogether untinctured with martial disci- 
pline, could not but be a valuable ally and a formidable 5 
enemy. It was not forgotten that Hampden and Pym 7S had 
been protected from lawless tyranny by the London train- 
bands ; that, in the great crisis of the Civil War, the London 
trainbands had marched to raise the siege of Gloucester; or 
that, in the movement against the military tyrants which fol- 10 
lowed the downfall of Richard Cromwell, 79 the London train- 
bands had borne a signal part. In truth, it is no exaggeration 
to say that, but for the hostility of the City, Charles the 
First would never have been vanquished, and that, without 
the help of the City, Charles the Second could scarcely have 15 
been restored. 

These considerations may serve to explain why, in spite 
of that attraction which had, during a long course of years, 
gradually drawn the aristocracy westward, a few men of high 
rank had continued, till a very recent period, to dwell in the 2 ° 
vicinity of the Exchange and of the Guildhall. Shaftes- 
bury 80 and Buckingham, while engaged in bitter and un- 
scrupulous opposition to the government, had thought that 
they could nowhere carry on their intrigues so conveniently 
or so securely as under the protection of the city magistrates 25 
and the city militia. Shaftesbury had therefore lived in 
Aldersgate Street, at a house which may still easily be 
known by pilasters and wreaths, the graceful work of 
Inigo. 81 Buckingham had ordered his mansion near Char- 
ing Cross, once the abode of the archbishops of York, to 30 
be pulled down ; and, while streets and alleys which are 
still named after him were rising on that site, chose to 
reside in Dowgate. 

These, however, were rare exceptions. Almost all the 



72 ENGLAND TN 1685. 

noble families of England had long migrated beyond the 
walls. The district where most of their town houses stood 
lies between the city and the regions which are now con- 
sidered as fashionable. A few great men still retained their 
5 hereditary hotels between the Strand and the river. The 
stately dwellings on the south and west of Lincoln's Inn 
Fields, the Piazza of Covent Garden, Southampton Square, 
which is now called Bloomsbury Square, and King's Square 
in Soho Fields, which is now called Soho Square, were 

io among the favorite spots. Foreign princes were carried to 
see Bloomsbury Square as one of the wonders of England. 
Soho Square, which had just been built, was to our ances- 
tors a subject of pride with which their posterity will hardly 
sympathize. Monmouth Square had been the name while 

15 the fortunes of the Duke of Monmouth flourished, and on 
the southern side towered his mansion. The front, though 
ungraceful, was lofty and richly adorned. The walls of the 
principal apartments were finely sculptured with fruit, foliage, 
and armorial bearings, and were hung with embroidered 

20 satin. Every trace of this magnificence has long disap- 
peared, and no aristocratical mansion is to be found in that 
once aristocratical quarter. A little way north from Hol- 
born, and on the verge of the pastures and cornfields, rose 
two celebrated palaces, each with an ample garden. One of 

25 them, then called Southampton House and subsequently Bed- 
ford House, was removed about fifty years ago to make room 
for a new city, which now covers, with its squares, streets, 
and churches, a vast area, renowned in the seventeenth 
century for peaches and snipes. The other, Montague 

30 House, celebrated for its frescoes and furniture, was. a few 
months after the death of Charles the Second, burned to the 
ground, and was speedily succeeded by a more magnificent 
Montague House, which, having been long the repository 
of such various and precious treasures of art, science, and 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 73 

learning as were scarce ever before assembled under a single 
roof, has just given place to an edifice more magnificent 
still. 

Nearer to the court, on a space called Saint James's 
Fields, had just been built Saint James's Square and Jenny n 5 
Street. Saint James's Church had recently been opened 
for the accommodation of the inhabitants of this new quar- 
ter. Golden Square, which was in the next generation in- 
habited by lords and ministers of state, had not yet been 
begun. Indeed the only dwellings to be seen on the north 10 
of Piccadilly were three or four isolated and almost rural 
mansions, of which the most celebrated was the costly pile 
erected by Clarendon, and nicknamed Dunkirk House. It 
had been purchased after its founder's downfall by the Duke 
of Albemarle. The Clarendon Hotel and Albemarle Street 15 
still preserve the memory of the site. 

He who then rambled to what is now the gayest and most 
crowded part of Regent Street found himself in a solitude, 
and was sometimes so fortunate as to have a shot at a 
woodcock.* On the north the Oxford Road ran between 20 
hedges. Three or four hundred yards to the south were 
the garden walls of a few great houses, which were con- 
sidered as quite out of town. On the west was a meadow 
renowned for a spring from which, long afterwards, Conduit 
Street was named. On the east was afield not to be passed 25 
without a shudder by any Londoner of that age. There, as 
in a place far from the haunts of men, had been dug, twenty 
years before, when the great plague was raging, a pit into 
which the dead carts had nightly shot corpses by scores. 
It was popularly believed that the earth was deeply tainted 30 
with infection, and could not be disturbed without imminent 
risk to human life. No foundations were laid there till two 

* Old General Oglethorpe, who lived to 1785, used to boast that he 
had shot here in Anne's reign. 



74 ENGLAND IN 1GS5. 

generations had passed without any return of the pestilence, 
and till the ghastly spot had long been surrounded by 
.» buildings.* 

We should greatly err if we were to suppose that any of 

5 the streets and squares then bore the same aspect as at 

present. The great majority of the houses, indeed, have, 

since that time, been wholly or in great part rebuilt. If 

the most fashionable parts of the capital could be placed 

- before us, such as they then were, we should be disgusted 

10 by their squalid appearance and poisoned by their noisome 
atmosphere. In Covent Garden a filthy and noisy market 
was held close to the dwellings of the great. Fruit women 
screamed, carters fought, cabbage stalks and rotten apples 
accumulated in heaps at the thresholds of the Countess of 

15 Berkshire and of the Bishop of Durham. 

The center of Lincoln's Inn Fields was an open space 
where the rabble congregated every evening, within a few 
yards of Cardigan House and Winchester House, to hear 
mountebanks harangue, to see bears dance, and to set dogs at 

20 oxen. Rubbish was shot in every part of the area. Horses 
were exercised there. The beggars were as noisy and im- 
portunate as in the worst governed cities of the Continent. 
A Lincoln's Inn mumper was a proverb. The whole frater- 
nity knew the arms and liveries of every charitably disposed 

25 grandee in the neighborhood, and, as soon as^is lordship's 
coach and six appeared, came hopping and crawling in 
crowds to persecute him. These disorders lasted, in spite 
of many accidents and of some legal proceedings, till, in the 
reign of George the Second, Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the 

30 Rolls, was knocked down and nearly killed in the middle of 
the square. Then at length palisades were set up and a 
pleasant garden laid out. 

* The pest field will be seen in maps of London as late as the end 
of George the First's reign. 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 75 

Saint James's Square was a receptacle for all the offal and 
cinders, for all the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster. 
At one time a cudgel player kept the ring there. At another 
time an impudent squatter settled himself there, and built a 
shed for rubbish under the windows of the gilded saloons in 5 
which the first magnates of the realm, Norfolks, Ormonds, 
Kents, and Pembrokes, gave banquets and balls. It was 
not till these nuisances had lasted through a whole genera- 
tion and till much had been written about them that the 
inhabitants applied to parliament for permission to put up 10 
rails and to plant trees. 

When such was the state of the quarter inhabited by the 
most luxurious portion of society, we may easily believe that 
the great body of the population suffered what would now 
be considered as insupportable grievances. The pavement 15 
was detestable ; all foreigners cried shame upon it. The 
drainage was so bad that in rainy weather the gutters soon 
became torrents. Several facetious poets have commemo- 
rated the fury with which these black rivulets roared down 
Snow Hill and Ludgate Hill, bearing to Fleet Ditch a vast 20 
tribute of animal and vegetable filth from the stalls of 
butchers and greengrocers. This flood was profusely thrown 
to right and left by coaches and carts. To keep as far 
from the carriage road as possible was therefore the wish 
of every pedestrian. The mild and timid gave the wall. 25 
The bold and athletic took it. If two roisters met, they 
cocked their hats in each other's faces and pushed each 
other about till the weaker was shoved towards the kennel. 
If he was a mere bully he sneaked off, muttering that he 
should find a time. If he was pugnacious, the encounter 30 
probably ended in a duel behind Montague House. 

The houses were not numbered. There would indeed 
have been little advantage in numbering them ; for of the 
coachmen, chairmen, porters, and errand boys of London, a 



76 ENGLAND TN 1685. 

very small portion could read. It was necessary to use 
marks which the most ignorant could understand. The 
shops were therefore distinguished by painted signs, which 
gave a gay and grotesque aspect to the streets. The walk 

5 from Charing Cross to Whitechapel lay through an endless 
succession of Saracen's Heads, Royal Oaks, Blue Bears, and 
Golden Lambs, which disappeared when they were no longer 
required for the direction of the common people. 

When the evening closed in, the difficulty and danger of 

io walking about London became serious indeed. The garret 
windows were opened, and pails were emptied, with little 
regard to those who were passing below. Falls, bruises, and 
broken bones were of constant occurrence. For, till the last 
year of the reign of Charles the Second, most of the streets 

15 were left in profound darkness. Thieves and robbers plied 
their trade with impunity ; yet they were hardly so terrible 
to peaceable citizens as another class of ruffians. It was a 
favorite amusement of dissolute young gentlemen to swagger 
by night about the town, breaking windows, upsetting 

20 sedans, beating quiet men, and offering rude caresses to 
pretty women. Several dynasties of these tyrants had, since 
the Restoration, domineered over the streets. The Muns 
and Tityre Tus had given place to the Hectors, and the 
Hectors had been recently succeeded by the Scourers. At 

25 a later period arose the Nicker, the Hawcubite, and the yet 
more dreaded name of Mohawk.* The machinery for keep- 

* It may'be suspected that some of the Tityre Tus, like good Cava- 
liers, broke Milton's windows shortly after the Restoration. I am con- 
fident that he was thinking of those pests of London when he dictated 
30 the noble lines, — 

"And in luxurious cities, when the noise 
Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers, 
And injury and outrage, and when night 
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons 
35 < >f Belial, flown with insolence and wine." 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 11 

ing the peace was utterly contemptible. There was an act 
of Common Council which provided that more than a thou- 
sand watchmen should be constantly on the alert in the city, 
from sunset to sunrise, and that every inhabitant should take 
his turn of duty. But the act was negligently executed. 5 
Few of those who were summoned left their homes ; and 
those few generally found it more agreeable to tipple in ale- 
houses than to pace the streets. 

It ought to be noticed that, in the last year of the reign of 
Charles the Second, began a great change in the police 10 
of London, — a change which has perhaps added as much to 
the happiness of the great body of the people as revolutions 
of much greater fame. An ingenious projector, named 
Edward Heming, obtained letters patent conveying to him, 
for a term of years, the exclusive right of lighting up London. 15 
He undertook, for a moderate consideration, to place a light 
before every tenth door, on moonless nights, from Michael- 
mas to Lady Day, and from six to twelve of the clock. 
Those who now see the capital all the year round, from dusk 
to dawn, blazing with a splendor compared with which the 20 
illuminations for La Hogue and Blenheim would have looked 
pale, may perhaps smile to think of Heming's lanterns, which 
glimmered feebly before one house in ten during a small 
part of one night in three. But such was not the feeling 
of his contemporaries. His scheme was enthusiastically 25 
applauded and furiously attacked. The friends of improve- 
ment extolled him as the greatest of all the benefactors of 
his city. What, they asked, were the boasted inventions 
of Archimedes when compared with the achievement of the 
man who had turned the nocturnal shades into noonday ? 3° 
In spite of these eloquent eulogies, the cause of darkness 
was not left undefended. There were fools in that age who 
opposed the introduction of what was called the new light 
as strenuously as fools in our age have opposed the intro- 



78 ENGLAND IN 1GS5. 

duction of vaccination and railroads, as strenuously as the 
fools of an age anterior to the dawn of history doubtless 
opposed the introduction of the plough and of alphabetical 
writing. Many years after the date of Heming's patent, 

5 there were extensive districts in which no lamp was seen. 
We may easily imagine what, in such times, must have 
been the state of the quarters peopled by the outcasts of 
society. Among those quarters one had attained a scandal- 
ous preeminence. On the confines of the city and the 

10 Temple had been founded, in the thirteenth century, a 
House of Carmelite Friars, distinguished by their white 
hoods. The precinct of this house had, before the Refor- 
mation, been a sanctuary for criminals, and still retained the 
privilege of protecting debtors from arrest. Insolvents con- 

15 sequently were to be found in every dwelling, from cellar to 
garret. Of these a large proportion were knaves and liber- 
tines, and were followed to their asylum by women more 
abandoned than themselves. The civil power was unable to 
keep order in a district swarming with such inhabitants ; 

20 and thus Whitefriars became the favorite resort of all who 
wished to be emancipated from the restraints of the law. 
Though the immunities legally belonging to the place ex- 
tended only to cases of debt, cheats, false witnesses, forgers, 
and highwaymen found refuge there. For amidst a rabble 

25 so desperate no peace officer's life was in safety. At the 
cry of " Rescue," bullies with swords and cudgels and ter- 
magant hags with spits and broomsticks poured forth by 
hundreds ; and the intruder was fortunate if he escaped 
back into Fleet Street, hustled, stripped, and pumped upon. 

3° Even the warrant of the Chief Justice of England could not 
be executed without the help of a company of musketeers. 
Such relics of the barbarism of the darkest ages were to be 
found within a short walk of the chambers where Soniers 82 
was studying history and law. of the chapel where Tillot- 



ENGLAND IX 1685. 79 

son 83 was preaching, of the coffee-house where Dryden 84 was 
passing judgment on poems and plays, and of the hall where 
the Royal Society was examining the astronomical system 
of Isaac Newton. 85 

Each of the two cities which made up the capital of Eng- 5 
land had its own center of attraction. In the metropolis 
of commerce the point of convergence was the Exchange; 
in the metropolis of fashion the Palace. But the Palace did 
not retain its influence so long as the Exchange. The 
revolution completely altered the relations between the court io 
and the higher classes of society. It was by degrees dis- 
covered that the king, in his individual capacity, had very 
little to give ; that coronets and garters, bishoprics, and em- 
bassies, lordships of the treasury, and tellerships of the 
Exchequer, nay, even charges in the royal stud and bed- 15 
chamber, were really bestowed, not by the king, but by his 
advisers. Every ambitious and covetous man perceived that 
he would consult his own interest far better by acquiring 
the dominion of a Cornish borough, and by rendering good 
service to the ministry during a critical session, than by be- 2 ° 
coming the companion or even the minion of his prince. It 
was therefore in the antechambers, not of George the First 
and of George the Second, but of Walpole and of Pelham, 
that the daily crowd of courtiers was to be found. 80 It is 
also to be remarked that the same revolution which made 25 
it impossible that our kings should use the patronage of the 
state, merely for the purpose of gratifying their personal 
predilections, gave us several kings unfitted by their educa- 
tion and habits to be gracious and affable hosts. They had 
been born and bred on the Continent. They never felt 3° 
themselves at home in our island. If they spoke our lan- 
guage they spoke it inelegantly and with effort. Our national 
character they never fully understood. Our national man- 
ners they hardly attempted to acquire. The most important 



80 ENGLAND TN 1685. 

part of their duty they performed better than any ruler who 
had preceded them, for they governed strictly according to 
law ; but they could not be the first gentlemen of the realm, 
the heads of polite society. If ever they unbent it was in a 
5 very small circle, where hardly an English face was to be 
seen ; and they were never so happy as when they could 
escape for a summer to their native land. They had indeed 
their days of reception for our nobility and gentry ; but the 
reception was mere matter of form, and became at last as 

io solemn a ceremony as a funeral. 

Not such was the court of Charles the Second. White- 
hall, when he dwelt there, was the focus of political intrigue 
and of fashionable gayety. Half the jobbing and half the 
flirting of the metropolis went on under his roof. Whoever 

15 could make himself agreeable to the prince or could secure 
the good offices of the mistress might hope to rise in the 
world without rendering any service to the government, with- 
out being even known by sight to any minister of state. 
This courtier got a frigate, and that a company; a third, the 

20 pardon of a rich offender; a fourth, a lease of crown land 
on easy terms. If the king notified his pleasure that a brief- 
less lawyer should be made a judge or that a libertine bar- 
onet should be made a peer, the gravest councillors, after 
a little murmuring, submitted. Interest, therefore, drew a 

25 constant press of suitors to the gates of the palace, and 
those gates always stood wide. The king kept open house 
every day, and all day long, for the good society of London, 
the extreme Whigs only excepted. Hardly any gentleman 
had any difficulty in making his way to the royal presence. 

30 The levee was exactly what the word imports. Some men 
of quality came every morning to stand round their master, 
to chat with him while his wig was combed and his cravat 
tied, and to accompany him in his early walk through the 
park. All persons who had been properly introduced might, 



ENGLAND IX 1685. 81 

without any special invitation, go to see him dine, sup, dance, 
and play at hazard, and might have the pleasure of hearing 
him tell stories, which, indeed, he told remarkably well, 
about his flight from Worcester, 87 and about the misery 
which he had endured when he was a state prisoner in the 5 
hands of the canting, meddling preachers of Scotland. By- 
standers whom his majesty recognized often came in for a 
courteous word. This proved a far more successful king- 
craft than any that his father or grandfather had practised. 
It was not easy for the most austere republican of the school 10 
of Marvel 88 to resist the fascination of so much good humor 
and affability ; and many a veteran Cavalier, in whose heart 
the remembrance of unrequited sacrifices and services had 
been festering during a quarter of a century, was compen- 
sated in one moment for wounds and sequestrations by his 15 
sovereign's kind nod, and " God bless you, my old friend ! " 
Whitehall naturally became the chief staple of news. 
Whenever there was a rumor that anything important had 
happened or was about to happen, people hastened thither 
to obtain intelligence from the fountain head. The galleries 20 
presented the appearance of a modern clubroom at an 
anxious time. They were full of people inquiring whether 
the Dutch mail was in, what tidings the express from France 
had brought, whether John Sobiesky had beaten the Turks, 
whether the Doge of Genoa was really at Paris. These were 25 
matters about which it was safe to talk aloud. But there 
were subjects concerning which information was asked and 
given in whispers. Had Halifax got the better of Roches- 
ter? 89 Was there to be a parliament ? Was the Duke of 
York really going to Scotland ? Had Monmouth !H) really 30 
been sent for to the Hague ? Men tried to read the counte- 
nance of every minister as he went through the throng to 
and from the royal closet. All sorts of auguries were drawn 
from the tone in which his majesty spoke to the Lord Presi- 



82 ENGLAND IN 1G85. 

dent, or from the laugh with which his majesty honored a 
jest of the Lord Privy Seal ; and, in a few hours, the hopes 
and fears inspired by such slight indications had spread to 
all the coffee-houses from St. James's to the Tower. 
5 The coffee-house must not be dismissed with a cursory 
mention. It might indeed, at that time, have been not 
improperly called a most important political institution. No 
parliament had sate for years. The municipal council of the 
city had ceased to speak the sense of the citizens. Public 

10 meetings, harangues, resolutions, and the rest of the modern 
machinery of agitation had not yet come into fashion. 
Nothing resembling the modern newspaper existed. In such 
circumstances, the coffee-houses were the chief organs 
through which the public opinion of the metropolis vented 

15 itself. 

The first of these establishments had been set up, in the 
time of the Commonwealth, by a Turkey merchant, who had 
acquired among the Mahometans a taste for their favorite 
beverage. The convenience of being able to make appoint- 

20 ments in any part of the town, and of being able to pass 
evenings socially at a very small charge, was so great that 
the fashion spread fast. Every man of the upper or middle 
class went daily to his coffee-house to learn the news and to 
discuss it. Every coffee-house had one or more orators to 

?5 whose eloquence the crowd listened with admiration, and 
who soon became, what the journalists of our own time have 
been called, a fourth estate of the realm. The court had 
long seen with uneasiness the growth of this new power in 
the state. An attempt had been made, during Danby's 

30 administration, to close the coffee-houses. But men of all 
parties missed their usual places of. resort so much that there 
was a universal outcry. The government did not venture, in 
opposition to a feeling so strong and general, to enforce a 
regulation of which the legality might well be questioned. 



ENGLAND IN 1685. S3 

Since that time ten years had elapsed, and, during those 
years, the number and influence of the coffee-houses had 
been constantly increasing. Foreigners remarked that the 
coffee-house was that which especially distinguished London 
from all other cities ; that the coffee-house was the Londoner's 5 
home, and that those who wished to find a gentleman com- 
monly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet Street or Chan- 
cery Lane, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the 
Rainbow. Nobody was excluded from these places who laid 
down his penny at the bar. Yet every rank and profession 10 
and every shade of religious and political opinion had its 
own headquarters. There were houses near St. James's 
Park where fops congregated, their heads and shoulders 
covered with black or flaxen wigs, not less ample than those 
which are now worn by the chancellor and by the speaker 15 
of the House of Commons. The wig came from Paris, and 
so did the rest of the fine gentleman's ornaments, his embroid- 
ered coat, his fringed gloves, and the tassel which upheld 
his pantaloons. The conversation was in that dialect which, 
long after it had ceased to be spoken in fashionable circles, 20 
continued, in the mouth of Lord Foppington, 91 to excite the 
mirth of theatres. The atmosphere was like that of a per- 
fumer's shop. Tobacco in any other form than that of richly 
scented snuff was held in abomination. If any clown, igno- 
rant of the usages of the house, called for a pipe, the sneers 25 
of the whole assembly and the short answers of the waiters 
soon convinced him that he had better go somewhere else. 
Nor, indeed, would he have had far to go. For, in general, 
the coffee-rooms reeked with tobacco like a guard room ; 
and strangers sometimes expressed their surprise that so 3° 
many people should leave their own firesides to sit in the 
midst of eternal fog and stench. Nowhere was the smoking 
more constant than at Will's. That celebrated house, situ- 
ated between Covent Garden and Bow Street, was sacred to 



84 ENGLAND TN 1685. 

polite letters. There the talk was about poetical justice and 
the unities of place and time. There was a faction for 
Perrault 93 and the moderns, a faction for Bpileau 98 and the 

ancients. One group debated whether Paradise Lost ought 
5 not to have been in rhyme. To another an~envious poetaster 
demonstrated that Venice Preserved'-* ought to have been 
hooted from the stage. Under no roof was a greater variety 
of figures to be seen, — earls in stars and garters, clergymen 
in cassocks and bands, pert templars, sheepish lads from the 

io universities, translators and index-makers in ragged coats of 
frieze. The great press was to get near the chair where 
John Dryden sate. In winter, that chair was always in the 
warmest nook by the fire; in summer, it stood in the balcony. 
To bow to him, and to hear his opinion of Racine's last 

i s tragedy or of Bossu's !)5 treatise on epic poetry, was thought 
a privilege. A pinch from his snuff-box was an honor suf- 
ficient to turn the head of a young enthusiast. There were 
coffee-houses where the first medical men might be consulted. 
Doctor John Radcliffe, who, in the year 1685, rose to the 

20 largest practice in London, came daily, at the hour when the 
Exchange was full, from his house in Bow Street, then a 
fashionable part of the capital, to Garraway's, and was to be 
found surrounded by surgeons and apothecaries at a particu- 
lar table. There were Puritan coffee-houses where no oath 

25 was heard, and where lank-haired men discussed election 
and reprobation through their noses ; Jew coffee-houses 
where dark-eyed money-changers from Venice and Amster- 
dam greeted each other; and Popish coffee-houses where, 
as good Protestants believed, Jesuits planned, over their 

3° cups, another great fire, and cast silver bullets to shoot the 
king. 

These gregarious habits had no small share in forming 
the character of the Londoner of that age. He was, indeed, 
a different being from the rustic Englishman. There was 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 85 

not then the intercourse which now exists between the two 
classes. Only very great men were in the habit of dividing 
the year between town and country. Few esquires came to 
the capital thrice in their lives. Nor was it yet the practice 
of all citizens in easy circumstances to breathe the fresh air 5 
of the fields and woods during some weeks of every summer. 
A cockney, in a rural village, was stared at as much as if he 
had intruded into a Kraal of Hottentots. On the other 
hand, when the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor 
appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished 10 
from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His 
dress, his gait, his accent, the manner in which he stared at 
the shops, stumbled into the gutters, ran against the porters, 
and stood under the waterspouts marked him out as an ex- 
cellent subject for the operations of swindlers and banterers. l S 
Bullies jostled him into the kennel. Hackney coachmen 
splashed him from head to foot. Thieves explored with 
perfect security the huge pockets of his horseman's coat, 
while he stood entranced by the splendor of the Lord 
Mayor's show. Money-droppers, sore from the cart's tail, 2 ° 
introduced themselves to him, and appeared to him the 
most honest, friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen. 
Painted women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone 
Park, passed themselves on him for countesses and maids of 
honor. If he asked his way to St. James's, his informants 2 5 
sent him to Mile End. If he went into a shop, he was 
instantly discerned to be a fit purchaser of everything that 
nobody else would buy, of second-hand embroidery, copper 
rings, and watches that would not go. If he rambled into 
any fashionable coffee-house, he became a mark for the inso- 3° 
lent derision of fops and the grave waggery of templars. 
Enraged and mortified, he soon returned to his mansion, 
and there, in the homage of his tenants and the conversa- 
tion of his boon companions, found consolation for the vexa- 



86 ENGL A VD TN 1685. 

tions and humiliations which lie had undergone. There he 
once more felt himself a great man ; and he saw nothing 
above him except when at the assizes he took his seat on 
the bench near the judge or when at the muster of the 
5 militia he saluted the lord lieutenant. 

The chief cause which made the fusion of* the different 
elements of society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty 
which our ancestors found in passing from place to place. 
Of all inventions, the alphabet and the printing-press alone 

io excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done 
most for the civilization of our species. Every improvement 
of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and 
intellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitates 
the interchange of the various productions of nature and 

15 art, but tends to remove national and provincial antipathies, 
and to bind together all the branches of the great human 
family. In the seventeenth century the inhabitants of Lon- 
don were, for almost every practical purpose, further from 
Reading than they now are from Edinburgh, and further 

20 from Edinburgh than they now are from Vienna. 

The subjects of Charles the Second were not, it is true, 
quite unacquainted with that principle which has, in our 
own time, produced an unprecedented revolution in human 
affairs, which has enabled navies to advance in the face of 

25 wind and tide, and battalions, attended by all their baggage 
and artillery, to traverse kingdoms at a pace equal to that 
of the fleetest race horse. The Marquess of Worcester had 
recently observed the expansive power of moisture rarefied 
by heat. After many experiments he had succeeded in con- 

3° structing a rude steam engine, which he called a fire water 
work, and which he pronounced to be an admirable and 
most forcible instrument of propulsion. But the marquess 
was suspected to be a madman and known to be a Papist. 
His inventions, therefore, found no favorable reception. 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 87 

His fire water work might, perhaps, furnish matter for con- 
versation at a meeting of the Royal Society, but was not 
applied to any practical purpose. There were no railways, 
except a few made of timber, from the mouths of the North- 
umbrian coal pits to the banks of the Tyne. There was 5 
very little internal communication by water. A few attempts 
had been made to deepen and embank the natural streams, 
but with slender success. Hardly a single navigable canal 
had been even projected. The English of that day were in 
the habit of talking with mingled admiration and despair of 10 
the immense trench by which Louis the Fourteenth had 
made a junction between the Atlantic and the Mediterra- 
nean. They little thought that their country would, in the 
course of a few generations, be intersected, at the cost of 
private adventures, by artificial rivers making up more than 15 
four times the length of the Thames, the Severn, and the 
Trent together. 

It was by the highways that both travelers and goods gen- 
erally passed from place to place. And those highways ap- 
pear to have been far worse than might have been expected 20 
from the degree of wealth and civilization which the nation 
had even then attained. On the best lines of communica- 
tion the ruts were deep, the descents precipitous, and the 
way often such as it was hardly possible to distinguish, in 
the dusk, from the unenclosed heath and fen which lay on 25 
both sides. Ralph Thoresby, the antiquary, was in danger 
of losing his way on the great North Road, between Barnby 
Moor and Tuxford, and actually lost it between Doncaster 
and York. Pepys and his wife, traveling in their own coach, 
lost their way between Newbury and Reading. In the 30 
course of the same tour they lost their way near Salisbury, 
and were in danger of having to pass the night on the plain. 
It was only in fine weather that the whole breadth of the 
road was available for wheeled vehicles. Often the mud 



ENGLAND IN 1685 



lay deep on the right and the left, and only a narrow track 
of firm ground rose above the quagmire. At such times 
obstructions and quarrels were frequent, and the path was 
sometimes blocked up during a long time by carriers, neither 
5 of whom would break the way. It happened almost every 
day that coaches stuck fast until a team of cattle could be 
procured from some neighboring farm to tug them out of 
the slough. But in bad seasons the traveler had to en- 
counter inconveniences still more serious. Thoresby, who 
10 was in the habit of traveling between Leeds and the capital, 
has recorded, in his Diary, such a series of perils and disas- 
ters as might suffice for a journey to the Frozen Ocean or 
to the Desert of Sahara. On one occasion he learned that 
the floods were out between Ware and London, that passen- 
15 gers had to swim for their lives, and that a higgler had 
perished in the attempt to cross. In consequence of these 
tidings he turned out of the high road and was conducted 
across some meadows, where it was necessary for him to 
ride to the saddle skirts in water. In the course of another 
20 journey he narrowly escaped being swept away by an inun- 
dation of the Trent. He was afterwards detained at Stam- 
ford four days on account of the state of the roads, and 
then ventured to proceed only because fourteen members of 
the House of Commons, who were going up in a body to 
25 parliament with guides and numerous attendants, took him 
into their company. On the roads of Derbyshire travelers 
were in constant fear for their necks, and were frequently 
compelled to alight and lead their beasts. The great route 
through Wales to Holyhead was in such a state that, in 
30 1685, a viceroy, on his road to Ireland, was five hours in 
traveling fourteen miles, from Saint Asaph to Conway. 
Between Conway and Beaumaris he was forced to walk a 
great part of the way, and his lady was carried in a litter. 
His coach was, with great difficulty and by the help of 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 89 

many hands, brought after him entire. In general, car- 
riages were taken to pieces at Conway and borne, on the 
shoulders of stout Welsh peasants, to the Menai Straits. 
In some parts of Kent and Sussex none but the strongest 
horses could, in winter, get through the bog, in which, at 5 
every step, they sank deep. The markets were often inac- 
cessible during several months. It is said that the fruits of 
the earth were sometimes suffered to rot in one place, while 
in another place, distant only a few miles, the supply fell 
far short of the demand. The wheeled carriages were, in 10 
this district, generally pulled by oxen. When Prince George 
of Denmark visited the stately mansion of Petworth in wet 
weather, he was six hours in going nine miles ; and it was 
necessary that a body of sturdy hinds should be on each 
side of his coach in order to prop it. Of the carriages 15 
which conveyed his retinue several were upset and injured. 
A letter from one of his gentlemen in waiting has been pre- 
served, in which the unfortunate courtier complains that, 
during fourteen hours, he never once alighted, except when 
his coach was overturned or stuck fast in the mud. 20 

One chief cause of the badness of the roads seems to have 
been the defective state of the law. Every parish was bound 
to repair the highways which passed through it. The peas- 
antry were forced to give their gratuitous labor six days in, 
the year. If this was not sufficient hired labor was employed, 25 
and the expense was met by a parochial rate. That a route 
connecting two great towns, which have a large and thriving 
trade with each other, should be maintained at the cost of 
the rural population scattered between them is obviously 
unjust; and this injustice was peculiarly glaring in the case 30 
of the great North Road, which traversed very poor and 
thinly inhabited districts, and joined very rich and populous 
districts. Indeed it was not in the power of the parishes of 
Huntingdonshire to mend a highway worn by the constant 



90 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

passing and repassing of traffic between the West Riding of 
Yorkshire and London. Soon after the Restoration this 
grievance attracted the notice of parliament; and an act, the 
first of our many turnpike acts, was passed, imposing a small 
5 toll on travelers and goods, for the purpose of keeping some 
parts of this important line of communication in good repair. 
This innovation, however, excited many murmurs, and the 
other great avenues to the capital were long left under the 
old system. A change was at length effected, but not with- 

io out great difficulty. For unjust and absurd taxation to which 

men are accustomed is often borne far more willingly than 

the most reasonable impost which is new. It was not till 

. many toll bars had been violently pulled down, till the troops 

had in many districts been forced to act against the people, 

15 and till much blood had been shed that a good system was 
introduced. By slow degrees reason triumphed over preju- 
dice; and our island is now crossed in every direction by 
near thirty thousand miles of turnpike road. 

On the best highways heavy articles were, in the time of 

20 Charles the Second, generally conveyed from place to place 
by stage wagons. In the straw of these vehicles nestled a 
crowd of passengers, who could not afford to travel by coach 
or on horseback, and who were prevented by infirmity or by 
# the weight of their luggage from going on foot. The expense 

25 of transmitting heavy goods in this way was enormous. 
From London to Birmingham the charge was seven pounds 
a ton; from London to Exeter twelve pounds a ton. This 
was about fifteen pence a ton for every mile, more by a third 
than was afterwards charged on turnpike roads, and fifteen 

30 times what is now demanded by railway companies. The 
cost of conveyance amounted to a prohibitory tax on many 
useful articles. Coal in particular was never seen ex- 
cept in the districts where it was produced or in the 
districts to which it could be carried by sea, and was 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 91 

indeed always known in the south of England by the 
name of sea coal. 

On byroads, and generally throughout the country north 
of York and west of Exeter, goods were carried by long 
trains of pack-horses. These strong and patient beasts, the 5 
breed of which is now extinct, were attended by a class of 
men who seem to have borne much resemblance to the 
Spanish muleteers. A traveler of humble condition often 
found it convenient to perform a journey mounted on a pack- 
saddle between two baskets, under the care of these hardy 10 
guides. The expense of this mode of conveyance was small. 
But the caravan moved at a foot's pace, and in winter the 
cold was often insupportable. 

The rich commonly traveled in their own carriages, with 
at least four horses. Cotton, the facetious poet, attempted to 15 
go from London to the Peak with a single pair, but found at 
St. Alban's that the journey would be insupportably tedious, 
and altered his plan. A coach and six is in our time never 
seen, except as part of some pageant. The frequent mention, 
therefore, of such equipages in old books is likely to mislead 20 
us. We attribute to magnificence what was really the effect 
of a very disagreeable necessity. People, in the time of 
Charles the Second, traveled with six horses, because with a 
smaller number there was great danger of sticking fast in the 
mire. Nor were even six horses always sufficient. Vanbrugh, 25 
in the succeeding generation, described with great humor the 
way in which a country gentleman, newly chosen a member 
of parliament, went up to London. On that occasion all the 
exertions of six beasts, two of which had been taken from 
the plough, could not save the family coach from being 3° 
imbedded in a quagmire. 

Public carriages had recently been much improved. Dur- 
ing the years which immediately followed the Restoration, a 
diligence ran between London and Oxford in two days. The 



92 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

passengers slept at Beaconsfield. At length, in the spring of 
1669, a great and daring innovation was attempted. It was 
announced that a vehicle, described as the Flying Coach, 
would perform the whole journey between sunrise and sun- 

5 set. This spirited undertaking was solemnly considered and 
sanctioned by the Heads of the University, and appears to 
have excited the same sort of interest which is excited in our 
own time by the opening of a new railway. The Vice-Chan- 
cellor, by a notice which was affixed in all public places, 

10 prescribed the hour and place of departure. The success of 
the experiment was complete. At six in the morning the 
carriage began to move from before the ancient front of All 
Soul's College, and at seven in the evening the adventurous 
gentlemen who had run the first risk were safely deposited 

15 at their inn in London. The emulation of the sister univer- 
sity was moved, and soon a diligence was set up which in 
one day carried passengers from Cambridge to the capital. 
At the close of the reign of Charles the Second, flying car- 
riages ran thrice a week from London to all the chief towns. 

20 But no stage coach, indeed no stage wagon, appears to have 
proceeded farther north than York or farther west than 
Exeter. The ordinary day's journey of a flying coach was 
about fifty miles in the summer; but in winter, when the 
ways were bad and the nights long, little more than thirty. 

25 The Chester coach, the York coach, and the Exeter coach 
generally reached London in four days during the fine 
season, but at Christmas not till the sixth day. The pas- 
sengers, six in number, were all seated in the carriage. For 
accidents were so frequent that it would have been most 

30 perilous to mount the roof. The ordinary fare was about 
twopence halfpenny a mile in summer, and somewhat more 
in winter. 

This mode of traveling, which by Englishmen of the pres- 
ent day would be regarded as insufferably slow, seemed to 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 93 

our ancestors wonderfully and indeed alarmingly rapid. In 
a work published a few months before the death of Charles 
the Second, the Hying coaches are extolled as far superior to 
any similar vehicles ever known in the world. Their velocity 
is the subject of special commendation, and is triumphantly 5 
contrasted with the sluggish pace of the continental posts. 
But with boasts like these was mingled the sound of com- 
plaint and invective. The interests of large classes had been 
unfavorably affected by the establishment of the new dili- 
gences; and, as usual, many persons were, from mere stupidity 10 
and obstinacy, disposed to clamor against the innovation, 
simply because it was an innovation. It was vehemently 
argued that this mode of conveyance would be fatal to the 
breed of horses and to the noble art of horsemanship; that 
the Thames, which had long been an important nursery of 15 
seamen, would cease to be the chief thoroughfare from Lon- 
don up to Windsor and down to Gravesend; that saddlers 
and spurriers would be ruined by hundreds; that numerous 
inns, at which mounted travelers had been in the habit of 
stopping, would be deserted, and would no longer pay any 20 
rent ; that the new carriages were too hot in summer and too 
cold in winter; that the passengers were greviously annoyed 
by invalids and crying children; that the coach sometimes 
reached the inn so late that it was impossible to get supper, 
and sometimes started so early that it was impossible to get 25 
breakfast. On these grounds it was gravely recommended 
that no public carriage should be permitted to have more 
than four horses, to start oftener than once a week, or to go 
more than thirty miles a day. It was hoped that, if this 
regulation were adopted, all except the sick and the lame 30 
would return to the old modes of traveling. Petitions em- 
bodying such opinions as these were presented to the king 
in council from several companies of the city of London, 
from several provincial towns, and from the justices of 



94 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

several counties. We smile at these things. It is not 
impossible that our descendants, when they read the history 
of the opposition offered by cupidity and prejudice to the 
improvements of the nineteenth century, may smile in their 
5 turn. 

**■ In spite of the attractions of the flying coaches, it was 
still usual for men who enjoyed health and vigor, and who 
were not encumbered by much baggage, to perform long 
journeys on horseback. If the traveler wished to move 

io expeditiously he rode post. Fresh saddle horses and guides 
were to be procured at convenient distances along all the 
great lines of road. The charge was threepence a mile for 
each horse and fourpence a stage for the guide. In this 
manner, when the ways were good, it was possible to travel, 

15 for a considerable time, as rapidly as by any conveyance 
known in England, till vehicles were propelled by steam. 
There were as yet no post chaises ; nor could those who 
rode in their own coaches ordinarily procure a change of 
horses. The king, however, and the great officers of state 

20 were able to command relays. Thus Charles commonly 
went in one day from Whitehall to Newmarket, a distance of 
about fifty-five miles through a level country ; and- this was 
thought by his subjects a proof of great activity. Evelyn 
performed the same journey in company with Lord Treasurer 

25 Clifford. The coach was drawn by six horses, which were 
changed at Bishop Stortford and again at Chesterford. The 
travelers reached Newmarket by night. Such a mode of 
conveyance seems to have been considered as a rare luxury 
confined to princes and ministers. 

30 Whatever might be the way in which a journey was per- 
formed, the travelers, unless they were numerous and well 
armed, ran considerable risk of being stopped and plundered. 
The mounted highwayman, a marauder known to our gener- 
ation only from books, was to be found on every main road. 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 95 

The waste tracts which lie on the great routes near London 
were especially haunted by plunderers of this class. Houn- 
slow Heath, on the great Western Road, and Finchley Common, 
on the great Northern Road, were perhaps the most cele- 
brated of these spots. The Cambridge scholars trembled 5 
when they approached Epping Forest, even in broad day- 
light. Seamen who had just been paid off at Chatham were 
often compelled to deliver their purses on Gadshill, cele- 
brated near a hundred years earlier by the greatest of poets 
as the scene of the depredations of Poins and Falstaff. 96 10 
The public authorities seem to have been often at a loss how 
to deal with these enterprising plunderers. At one time it 
was announced in the Gazette that several persons, who 
were strongly suspected of being highwaymen, but against 
whom there was not sufficient evidence, would be paraded 15 
at Newgate in riding dresses; their horses would also be 
shown; and all gentlemen who had been robbed were invited 
to inspect this singular exhibition. On another occasion a 
pardon was publicly offered to a robber if he would give up 
some rough diamonds of immense value which he had taken 20 
when he stopped the Harwich mail. A short time after 
appeared another proclamation, warning the innkeepers that 
the eye of the government was upon them. Their criminal 
connivance, it was affirmed, enabled banditti to infest the 
roads with impunity. That these suspicions were not with- 25 
out foundation is proved by the dying speeches of some 
penitent robbers of that age, who appear to have received 
from the innkeepers services much resembling those which 
Farquhar's Boniface rendered to Gibbet. 97 t* 

It was necessary to the success and even to the safety of 3° 
the highwayman that he should be a bold and skillful rider, 
and that his manners and appearance should be such as 
suited the master of a fine horse. He therefore held an 
aristocratical position in the community of thieves, appeared 



96 ENGLAND IN 2685. 

at fashionable coffee-houses and gaming-houses, and betted 
with men of quality on the race-ground.* Sometimes, in- 
deed, he was a man of good family and education. A 
romantic interest, therefore, attached, and perhaps still 
5 attaches, to the names of freebooters of this class. The 
vulgar eagerly drank in tales of their ferocity and audacity, 
of their occasional acts of generosity and good-nature, of 
their amours, of their miraculous escapes, of their desperate 
struggles, and of their manly bearing at the bar and in the 

io cart. Thus it was related of William Nevison, the great 
robber of Yorkshire, that he levied a quarterly tribute on all 
the northern drovers, and in return, not only spared them 
himself, but protected them against all other thieves ; that 
he demanded purses in the most courteous manner ; that he 

15 gave largely to the poor what he had taken from the rich ; 
that his life was once spared by the royal clemency, but 
that he again tempted his fate, and at length died, in 1685, 
on the gallows of York.f It was related how Claude Duval, 
the French page of the Duke of Richmond, took to the road, 

20 became captain of a formidable gang, and had the honor to 
be named first in a royal proclamation against notorious 
offenders ; how at the head of his troop he stopped a lady's 
coach, in which there was a booty of four hundred pounds ; 
how he took only one hundred and suffered the fair owner 

25 to ransom the rest by dancing a coranto with him on the 

* Aimwcll. Pray, sir, han't I seen your face at Will's coffee-house ? 
Gibbet. Yes, sir, and at White's too. Beaux' Stratagem. 
t Gent's History of York. Another marauder of the same descrip- 
tion, named Biss, was hanged at Salisbury in 1695. in a ballad which 
30 is in the Pepysian Library, he is represented as defending himself thus 
before the judge : — 

" What say you now, my honored Lord ? 
What harm was there in this ? 
Rich, wealthy misers were abhorred 
35 By brave, freehearted Biss." 



ENGLAND IN 16S5. 97 

heath ; how his vivacious gallantry stole away the hearts 
of all women ; how his dexterity at sword and pistol made 
him a terror to all men ; how at length, in the year 1670, he 
was seized when overcome by wine ; how dames of high 
rank visited him in prison, and with tears interceded for his 5 
life ; how the king would have granted a pardon but for 
the interference of Judge Morton, the terror of highwaymen, 
who threatened to resign his office unless the law were 
carried into full effect; and how, after the execution, the 
corpse lay in state with all the pomp of scutcheons, wax 10 
lights, black hangings, and mutes, till the same cruel judge 
who had intercepted the mercy of the crown sent officers to 
disturb the obsequies. In these anecdotes there is doubt- 
less a large mixture of fable ; but they are not on that 
account unworthy of being recorded, for it is both an 15 
authentic and an important fact that such tales, whether 
false or true, were heard by our ancestors with eagerness 
and faith. 

All the various dangers by which the traveler was beset 
were greatly increased by darkness. He was therefore com- 20 
monly desirous of having the shelter of a roof during the 
night, and such shelter it was not difficult to obtain. From 
a very early period the inns of England had been renowned. 
Our first great poet had described the excellent accommoda- 
tion which they afforded to the pilgrims of the fourteenth 25 
century. Nine and twenty persons, with their horses, found 
room in the wide chambers and stables of the Tabard in 
Southwark. 97a The food was of the best, and the wines such 
as drew the company on to drink largely. Two hundred 
years later, under the reign of Elizabeth, William Harrison 30 
gave a lively description of the plenty and comfort of the 
great hostelries. The continent of Europe, he said, could 
show nothing like them. There were some in which two or 
three hundred people, with their horses, could without diffi- 



98 ENGLAND IN 1686. 

culty be lodged and fed. The bedding, the tapestry, above 
all, the abundance of clean and fine linen was matter of 
wonder. Valuable plate was often set on the tables. Nay, 
there were signs which had cost thirty or forty pounds. In 
5 the seventeenth century England abounded with excellent 
inns of every rank. The traveler sometimes, in a small 
village, lighted on a public house such as Walton has de- 
scribed, where the brick floor was swept clean, where the 
walls were stuck round with ballads, where the sheets smelt 

io of lavender, and where a blazing fire, a cup of good ale, and 
a dish of trouts fresh from the neighboring brook were to be 
procured at small charge. At the larger houses of entertain- 
ment were to be found beds hung with silk, choice cookery, 
and claret equal to the best which was drunk in London. 

15 The innkeepers too, it was said, were not like other inn- 
keepers. On the Continent the landlord was the tyrant of 
those who crossed the threshold. In England he was a 
servant. Never was an Englishman more at home than 
when he took his ease in his inn. Even men of fortune, who 

20 might in their own mansions have enjoyed every luxury, 
were often in the habit of passing their evenings in the 
parlor of some neighboring house of public entertainment. 
They seem to have thought that comfort and freedom could 
in no other place be enjoyed in equal perfection. This 

25 feeling continued during many generations to be a national 
peculiarity. The liberty and jollity of inns long furnished 
matter to our novelists and dramatists. Johnson declared 
that a tavern chair was the throne of human felicity ; and 
Shenstone 98 gently complained that no private roof, however 

30 friendly, gave the wanderer so warm a welcome as that 
which was to be found at an inn. 

Many conveniences, which were unknown at Hampton 
Court and Whitehall in (he seventeenth century, are to be 
found in our modern hotels. Yet on the whole it is certain 



ENGLAND IX 1685. 99 

that the improvement of our houses of public entertainment 
has by no means kept pace with the improvement of our 
roads and of our conveyances. Nor is this strange ; for it is 
evident that, all other circumstances being supposed equal, 
the inns will be best where the means of locomotion are 5 
worst. The quicker the rate of traveling, the less important 
is it that there should be numerous agreeable resting-places 
for the traveler. A hundred and sixty years ago, a person 
who came up to the capital from a remote county generally 
required twelve or fifteen meals and lodging for five or six 10 
nights by the way. If he were a great man, he expected 
the meals and lodging to be comfortable and even luxurious. 
At present, we fly from York or Chester to London by the 
light of a single winter's day. At present, therefore, a trav- 
eler seldom interrupts his journey merely for the sake of 15 
rest and refreshment. The consequence is that hundreds of 
excellent inns have fallen into utter decay. In a short time, 
no good houses of that description will be found, except at 
places where strangers are likely to be detained by business 
or pleasure. 20 

The mode in which correspondence was carried on be- 
tween distant places may excite the scorn of the present 
generation; yet it was such as might have moved the admira- 
tion and envy of the polished nations of antiquity or of the 
contemporaries of Raleigh and Cecil. A rude and imperfect 25 
establishment of posts for the conveyance of letters had been 
set up by Charles the First, and had been swept away by 
the Civil War. Under the Commonwealth the design was 
resumed. At the Restoration the proceeds of the post office, 
after all expenses had been paid, were settled on the Duke 30 
of York. On most lines of road the mails went out and 
came in only on the alternate days. In Cornwall, in the fens 
of Lincolnshire, and among the hills and lakes of Cumber- 
land, letters were received only once a week. During a royal 



100 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

progress a daily post was despatched from the capital to 
the place where the court sojourned. There was also daily 
communication between London and the Downs ; and the 
same privilege was sometimes extended to Tunbridge Wells 

5 and Bath at the seasons when those places were crowded by 
the great. The bags were carried on horseback day and 
night, at the rate of about five miles an hour. 

The revenue of this establishment was not derived solely 
from the charge for the transmission of letters. The post 

io office alone was entitled to furnish post horses; and from the 
care with which this monopoly was guarded, we may infer 
that it was found profitable. If, indeed, a traveler had 
waited half an hour without being supplied, he might hire a 
horse wherever he could. 

15 To facilitate correspondence between one part of London 
and another was not originally one of the objects of the post 
office. But in the reign of Charles the Second, an enterpris- 
ing citizen of London, William Dockwray, set up, at great 
expense, a penny post, which delivered letters and parcels 

20 six or eight times a day in the busy and crowded streets 
near the Exchange, and four times a day in the outskirts of 
the capital. This improvement was, as usual, strenuously 
resisted. The porters complained that their interests were 
attacked, and tore down the placards in which the scheme 

25 was announced to the public. The excitement caused by 
Godfrey's death and by the discovery of Coleman's papers " 
was then at the height. A cry was therefore raised that the 
penny post was a Popish contrivance. The great Doctor 
Oates, 100 it was affirmed, had hinted a suspicion that the 

30 Jesuits were at the bottom of the scheme, and that the bags, 
if examined, would be found full of treason. The utility of 
the enterprise was, however, so great and obvious that all 
opposition proved fruitless. As soon as it became clear that 
the speculation would be lucrative, the Duke of York com- 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 101 

plained of it as an infraction of his monopoly, and the courts 
of law decided in his favor. 

The revenue of the post office was from the first constantly 
increasing. In the year of the Restoration a committee of 
the House of Commons, after strict inquiry, had estimated 5 
the net receipt at about twenty thousand pounds. At the 
close of the reign of Charles the Second the net receipt was 
little short of fifty thousand pounds, and this was then thought 
a stupendous sum. The gross receipt was about seventy 
thousand pounds. The charge for conveying a single letter 10 
was twopence for eighty miles and threepence for a longer 
distance. The postage increased in proportion to the weight 
of the packet. At present a single letter is carried to the 
extremity of Scotland or of Ireland for a penny, and the 
monopoly of post horses has long ceased to exist. Yet 15 
the gross annual receipts of the department amount to more 
than ;£i, 800,000, and the net receipts to more than ^"700,000. 
It is, therefore, scarcely possible to doubt that the number 
of letters now conveyed by mail is seventy times the number 
which was so conveyed at the time of the accession of James 20 
the Second. y 

No part of the load which the old mails carried out was 
more important than the newsletters. In 1685 nothing like 
the London daily paper of our time existed or could exist. 
Neither the necessary capital nor the necessary skill was to 25 
be found. Freedom, too, was wanting — a want as fatal as 
that of either capital or skill. The press was not indeed at 
that moment under a general censorship. The licensing act, 
which had been passed soon after the Restoration, had 
expired in 1679. Any person might, therefore, print, at his 3° 
own risk, a history, a sermon, or a poem, without the pre- 
vious approbation of any public officer; but the judges were 
unanimously of opinion that this liberty did not extend to 
gazettes, and that, by the common law of England, no man, 



102 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

not authorized by the crown, had a right to publish political 
news. While the Whig party was still formidable, the gov- 
ernment thought it expedient occasionally to connive at the 
violation of this rule. During the great battle of the Exclu- 
5 sion Bill, many newspapers were suffered to appear: the 
Protestant Intelligence, the Current Intelligence, the Domestic 
Intelligence, the True News, the London Mercury. None of 
these were published oftener than twice a week. None 
exceeded in size a single small leaf. The quantity of matter 

io which one of them contained in a year was not more than is 
often found in two numbers of the Times. After the defeat 
of the Whigs it was no longer necessary for the king to be 
sparing in the use of that which all his judges had pro- 
nounced to be his undoubted prerogative. At the close of 

15 his reign, no newspaper was suffered to appear without his 
allowance ; and his allowance was given exclusively to the 
London Gazette. The London Gazette came out only on 
Mondays and Thursdays. The contents generally were a 
royal proclamation, two or three Tory addresses, notices of 

20 two or three promotions, an account of a skirmish between 
the imperial troops and the Janizaries 1()1 on the Danube, a 
description of a highwayman, an announcement of a grand 
cockfight between two persons of honor, and an advertise- 
ment offering a reward for a strayed dog. The whole made 

25 up two pages of moderate size. Whatever was communi- 
cated respecting matters of the highest moment was commu- 
nicated in the most meagre and formal style. Sometimes, 
indeed, when the government was disposed to gratify the 
public curiosity respecting an important transaction, a broad- 

30 side was put forth, giving fuller details than could be found 
in the Gazette ; but neither the Gazette nor any supplemen- 
tary broadside printed by authority ever contained any intel- 
ligence which it did not suit the purposes of the court to 
publish. The most important parliamentary debates, the 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 103 

most important state trials recorded in our history were 
passed over in profound silence.* In the capital the coffee- 
houses supplied, in some measure, the place of a journal. 
Thither the Londoners flocked as the Athenians of old 
Hocked to the market-place to hear whether there was any 5 
news. There men might learn how brutally a Whig had . 
been treated the day before in Westminster Hall, what hor- 
rible accounts the letters from Edinburgh gave of the tor- 
turing of Covenanters, how grossly the navy board had 
cheated the crown in the victualling of the fleet, and what 10 
grave charges the Lord Privy Seal had brought against the 
treasury in the matter of the hearth money. But people 
who lived at a distance from the great theatre of political 
contention could be kept regularly informed of what was 
passing there only by means of newsletters. To prepare 15 
such letters became a calling in London, as it now is among 
the nathes of India. The newswriter rambled from coffee- 
room to coffee-room, collecting reports, squeezed himself into 
the Sessions House at the Old Bailey, if there was an inter- 
esting trial, nay, perhaps obtained admission to the gallery 20 
of Whitehall, and noticed how the king and duke looked. 
In this way he gathered materials for weekly epistles, 
destined to enlighten some country town or some bench of 
rustic magistrates. Such were the sources from which the 
inhabitants of the largest provincial cities and the great 25 
body of the gentry and clergy learned almost all that they 
knew of the history of their own time. We must suppose 
that at Cambridge there were as many persons curious to 
know what was passing in the world as at almost any place 
in the kingdom, out of London. Yet at Cambridge, during 30 
a great part of the reign of Charles the Second, the doctors 

* For example, there is not a word in the Gazette about the impor- 
tant parliamentary proceedings of November, 1685, or about the trial 
and acquittal of the seven bishops. 



104 ENGLAND IN 1686. 

of laws and the masters of arts had no regular supply of 
news except through the London Gazette. At length the serv- 
ices of one of the collectors of intelligence in the capital 
were employed. That was a memorable day on which the 
5 first newsletter from London was laid on the table of the 
only coffee-room in Cambridge. At the seat of a man of 
fortune in the country, the newsletter was impatiently 
expected. Within a week after it had arrived, it had been 
thumbed by twenty families. It furnished the neighboring 

to squires with matter for talk over their October, and the neigh- 
boring rectors with topics for sharp sermons against Whig- 
gery or Popery. Many of these curious journals might 
doubtless still be detected by a diligent search in the archives 
of old families. Some are to be found in our public libraries; 

15 and one series, which is not the least valuable part of the 
literary treasures collected by Sir' James Mackintosh, will be 
occasionally quoted in the course of this work. 

It is scarcely necessary to say that there were then no 
provincial newspapers. Indeed, except in the capital and 

20 at the two universities, there was scarcely a printer in the 
kingdom. The only press in England north of Trent ap- 
pears to have been at York. 

It was not only by means of the London Gazette that the 
government undertook to furnish political instruction to the 

25 people. That journal contained a scanty supply of news 
without comment. Another journal, published under the 
patronage of the court, consisted of comment without news. 
This paper, called the Obse?-vator, was edited by an old 
Tory pamphleteer named Roger Lestrange. Lestrange was 

30 by no means deficient in readiness and shrewdness, and 
his diction, though coarse and disfigured by a mean and 
flippant jargon which then passed for wit in the greenroom 
and the tavern, was not without keenness and vigor. But 
his nature, at once ferocious and ignoble, showed itself in 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 105 

every line that he penned. When the first Observators 
appeared, there was some excuse for his acrimony. For 
the Whigs were then powerful, and he had to contend 
against numerous adversaries, whose unscrupulous violence 
might seem to justify unsparing retaliation. But in 1685 5 
all opposition had been crushed. A generous spirit would 
have disdained to insult a party which could not reply, and 
to aggravate the misery of prisoners, of exiles, of bereaved 
families ; but from the malice of Lestrange the grave was 
no hiding-place and the house of mourning no sanctuary. 10 
In the last month of the reign of Charles the Second, Wil- 
liam Jenkyn, an aged dissenting pastor of great note, who 
had been cruelly persecuted for no crime but that of wor- 
shipping God according to the fashion generally followed 
throughout Protestant Europe, died of hardships and priva- 15 
tions in Newgate. The outbreak of popular sympathy could 
not be repressed. The corpse was followed to the grave 
by a train of a hundred and fifty coaches. Even courtiers 
looked sad. Even the unthinking king showed some signs 
of concern. Lestrange alone set up a howl of savage ex- 20 
ultation, laughed at the weak compassion of the Trimmers, 
proclaimed that the blasphemous old impostor had met with 
a most righteous punishment, and vowed to wage war, not 
only to the death, but after death, with all the mock saints 
and martyrs. Such was the spirit of the paper which was 25 
at this time the oracle of the Tory party, and especially of 
the parochial clergy. 

Literature which could be carried by the post bag then 
formed the greater part of the intellectual nutriment rumi- 
nated by the country divines and country justices. The 3° 
difficulty and expense of conveying large packets from place 
to place were so great that an extensive work was longer 
in making its way from Paternoster Row to Devonshire or 
Lancashire than it now is in reaching Kentucky. How 



106 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

scantily a rural parsonage was then furnished, even with 
books the most necessary to a theologian, has already been 
remarked. The houses of the gentry were not more plenti- 
fully supplied. Few knights of the shire had libraries so 
5 good as may now perpetually be found in a servant's hall 
or in the back parlor of a small shopkeeper. An esquire 
passed among his neighbors for a great scholar if Hudibras 
and Baker's Chronie/e, TarltorCs Jests, and the Seven Cham- 
pions of Christendom lay in his hall window among the fish- 

io ing-rods and fowling-pieces. No circulating library, no book 
society then existed even in the capital ; but in the capital 
those students who could not afford to purchase largely 
had a resource. The shops of the great booksellers, near 
Saint Paul's Churchyard, were crowded every day and all 

1 5 day long with readers, and a knOwn customer was often 
permitted to carry a volume home. In the country there 
was no such accommodation, and every man was under the 
necessity of buying whatever he wished to read.* 

As to the lady of the manor and her daughters, their 

20 literary stores generally consisted of a prayer book and a 
receipt book. But in truth they lost little by living in rural 
seclusion. For even in the highest ranks and in those 
situations which afforded the greatest facilities for mental 
improvement, the English women of that generation were 

25 decidedly worse educated than they have been at any other 
time since the Revival of Learning. At an earlier period, 
they had studied the masterpieces of ancient genius. In 
the present day, they seldom bestow much attention on the 
dead languages, but they are familiar with the tongue of 

30 * Cotton seems, from his Angler, to have found room for his whole 
library in his hall window, and Cotton was a man of letters. Even 
when Franklin first visited London in 1724, circulating libraries were 
unknown there. The crowd at the booksellers' shops in Little Britain 
is mentioned by Roger North in his life of his brother John. 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 107 

Pascal and Moliere, 102 with the tongue of Dante and 
Tasso, 103 with the tongue of Goethe and Schiller; 104 nor is 
there any purer or more graceful English than that which 
accomplished women now-speak and write. But during the 
latter part of the seventeenth century, the culture of the 5 
female mind seems to have been almost* entirely neglected. 
If a damsel had the least smattering of literature, she was 
regarded as a prodigy. Ladies highly born, highly bred, 
and naturally quick-witted were unable to write a line in 
their mother tongue without solecisms and faults of spelling 10 
such as a charity girl would now be ashamed to commit.* 

The explanation may easily be found. Extravagant licen- 
tiousness, the natural effect of extravagant austerity, was 
now the mode ; and licentiousness had produced its ordinary 
effect, the moral and intellectual degradation of women. 15 
To their personal beauty it was the fashion to pay rude and 
impudent homage. But the admiration and desire which 
they inspired were seldom mingled with respect, with affec- 
tion, or with any chivalrous sentiment. The qualities which 
fit them to be companions, advisers, confidential friends, 20 
rather repelled than attracted the libertines of Whitehall. 
In that court, a maid of honor, who dressed in such a man- 
ner as to do full justice to a white bosom, who ogled signi- 
ficantly, who danced voluptuously, who excelled in pert 
repartee, who was not ashamed to romp with lords of the 25 
bedchamber and captains of the guards, to sing sly verses 
with sly expression, or to put on a page's dress for a frolic, 
was more likely to be followed and admired, more likely to 

* One instance will suffice. Queen Mary had good natural abilities. 
had been educated by a bishop, was fond of history and poetry, and 30 
was regarded by very eminent men as a superior woman. There is, in 
the library of the Hague, a superb English Bible which was delivered 
to her when she was crowned in Westminister Abbey. In the title 
page are these words in her own hand : " This book was given the 
king and I, at our crownation. Marie R." 35 



108 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

be honored with royal attentions, more likely to win a rich 
and noble husband than Jane Grey or Lucy Hutchinson 
would have been. 105 In such circumstances the standard of 
female attainments was necessarily low ; and it was more 
5 dangerous to be above that standard than to be beneath it. 
Extreme ignorance and frivolity were thought less unbecom- 
ing in a lady than the slightest tincture of pedantry. Of 
the too celebrated women whose faces we still admire on 
the walls of Hampton Court, few indeed were in the habit 

io of reading anything more valuable than acrostics, lampoons, 
and translations of the Clelia and the Grand Cyrus™ 

The literary acquirements, even of the accomplished gen- 
tlemen of that generation, seem to have been somewhat less 
solid and profound than at an earlier or a later period. 

15 Greek learning, at least, did not flourish among us in the 
days of Charles the Second as it had flourished before the 
Civil War, or as it again flourished long after the Revolu- 
tion. There were undoubtedly scholars to whom the whole 
Greek literature from Homer to Photius was familiar ; but 

20 such scholars were to be found almost exclusively among 
the clergy resident at the universities, and even at the uni- 
versities were few, and were not fully appreciated. At 
Cambridge it was not thought by any means necessary that 
a divine should be able to read the Gospels in the original. ' 

25 Nor was the standard at Oxford higher. When, in the reign 
of William the Third, Christ Church rose up as one man to 
defend the genuineness of the Epistles of Phalaris, 107 that 
great college, then considered as the first seat of philology in 
the kingdom, could not muster such a stock of Attic learn- 

3° ing as is now possessed by several youths at every great 
public school. It may easily be supposed that a dead lan- 

* Roger North tells us that his brother John, who was Greek pro- 
fessor at Cambridge, complained bitterly of the genera] neglect of the 
Greek tongue among the academical clergy. 



ENGLAND IN 168 5. 109 

guage, neglected at the universities, was not much studied 
by men of the world. In a former age, the poetry and elo- 
quence of Greece had been the delight of Raleigh and 
Falkland. 108 In a later age, the poetry and eloquence of 
Greece were the delight of Pitt and Fox, of Windham and 5 
Grenville. 109 But during the latter part of the seventeenth 
century there was in England scarcely one eminent states- 
man who could read with enjoyment a page of Sophocles or 
Plato. 

Good Latin scholars were numerous. The language of 10 
Rome, indeed, had not altogether lost its imperial character, 
and was still, in many parts of Europe, almost indispensable 
to a traveler or a negotiator. To speak it well was there- 
fore a much more common accomplishment than in our 
time ; and neither Oxford nor Cambridge wanted poets who, 15 
on a great occasion, could lay at the foot of the throne 
happy imitations of the verses in which Virgil and Ovid had 
celebrated the greatness of Augustus. 110 

Yet even the Latin was giving way to a younger rival. 
France united at that time almost every species of ascend- 20 
ency. Her military glory was at the height. She had 
vanquished mighty coalitions. She had dictated treaties. 
She had subjugated great cities and provinces. She had 
forced the Castilian pride to yield her the precedence. She 
had summoned Italian princes to prostrate themselves at 25 
her footstool. Her authority was supreme in all matters of 
good breeding, from a duel to a minuet. She determined 
how a gentleman's coat must be cut, how long his peruke 
must be, whether his heels must be high or low, and whether 
the lace on his hat must be broad or narrow. In literature 3° 
she gave law to the world. The fame of her great writers 
filled Europe. No other country could produce a tragic 
poet equal to Racine, 111 a comic poet equal to Moliere, a 
trifler so agreeable as La Fontaine, 112 a rhetorician so skillful 



110 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

as Bossuet. The literary glory of Italy and of Spain had set ; 
that of Germany had not yet dawned. The genius, there- 
fore, of the eminent men who adorned Paris shone forth 
with a splendor which was set off to full advantage by con- 
5 trast. France, indeed, had at that time an empire over 
mankind, such as even the Roman Republic never attained. 
For when Rome was politically dominant, she was in arts 
and letters the humble pupil of Greece. France had, over 
the surrounding countries, at once the ascendency which 

10 Rome had over Greece, and the ascendency which Greece 
had over Rome. French was fast becoming the universal 
language, the language of fashionable society, the language 
of diplomacy. At several courts princes and nobles spoke 
it more accurately and politely than their mother tongue. 

15 In our island there was less of this servility than on the 
Continent. Neither our good nor our bad qualities were 
those of imitators. Yet even here homage was paid, awk- 
wardly indeed and sullenly, to the literary supremacy of our 
neighbors. The melodious Tuscan, so familiar to the gal- 

20 lants and ladies of the court of Elizabeth, sank into con- 
tempt. A gentleman who quoted Horace or Terence was 
considered in good company as a pompous pedant. But to 
garnish his conversation with scraps of French was the best 
proof which he could give of his parts and attainments.* 

25 New canons of criticism, new models of style came into 
fashion. The quaint ingenuity which had deformed the 
verses of Donne 113 and had been a blemish on those of 
Cowley 1H disappeared from our poetry. Our prose becnm : 
less majestic, less artfully involved, less variously musical 

30 * Butler in a satire of great asperity says, 

" For, though to smatter words of Greek 
And Latin be the rhetorique 
Of pedants counted, and vainglorious, 
To smatter French is meritorious." 



ENGLAND IN 1685. Ill 

than that of an earlier age, but more lucid, more easy, and 
better fitted for controversy and narrative. In these changes 
it is impossible not to recognize the influence of French 
precept and of French example. Great masters of our lan- 
guage, in their most dignified compositions, affected to use 5 
French words when English words, quite as expressive and 
melodious, were at hand : * and from France was imported 
the tragedy in rhyme, an exotic which, in our soil, drooped 
and speedily died. 

It would have been well if our writers had also copied the 10 
decorum which their great French contemporaries, with few 
exceptions, preserved ; for the profligacy of the English 
plays, satires, songs, and novels of that age is a deep blot 
on our national fame. The evil may easily be traced to its 
source. The wits and the Puritans had never been on 15 
friendly terms. There was no sympathy between the two 
classes. They looked on the whole system of human life 
from different points and in different lights. The earnest of 
each was the jest of the other. The pleasures of each were 
the torments of the other. To the stern precisian even the 20 
innocent sport of the fancy seemed a crime. To light and 
festive natures the solemnity of the zealous brethren fur- 
nished copious matter of ridicule. From the Reformation 
to the Civil War, almost every writer, gifted with a fine 
sense of the ludicrous, had taken some opportunity of assail- 25 
ing the straight-haired, snuffling, whining saints, who chris- 
tened their children out of the Book of Nehemiah, who 
groaned in spirit at the sight of Jack in the Green, 115 and 
who thought it impious to taste plum porridge on Christmas 

* The most offensive instance which I remember is in a poem on 30 

the coronation of Charles the Second by Dryden, who certainly could 

not plead poverty as an excuse for borrowing words from any foreign 

tongue: „ Tra 

Hither in summer evenings you repair, 

To taste the fraicheur of the cooler air." 



112 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

1 )ay. At length a time came when the laughers began to 
look grave in their turn. The rigid, ungainly zealots, after 
having furnished much good sport during two generations, 
rose up in arms, conquered, ruled, and, grimly smiling, trod 

5 down under their feet the whole crowd of mockers. The 
wounds inflicted by gay and petulant malice were retaliated 
with the gloomy and implacable malice peculiar to bigots 
who mistake their own rancor for virtue. The theatres 
were closed. The players were flogged. The press was 

io put under the guardianship of austere licensers. The Muses 
were banished from their own favorite haunts. Cowley was 
ejected from Cambridge and Crashaw from Oxford. 116 The 
young candidate for academical honors was no longer re- 
quired to write Ovidian epistles or Virgilian pastorals, but 

15 was strictly interrogated by a synod of lowering Supralapsa- 
rians 117 as to the day and hour when he experienced the 
new birth. Such a system was of course fruitful of hypo- 
crites. Under sober clothing and under visages composed 
to the expression of austerity lay hid during several years 

20 the intense desire of license and of revenge. At length 
that desire was gratified. The Restoration emancipated 
thousands of minds from a yoke which had become insup- 
portable. The old fight recommenced, but with an ani- 
mosity altogether new. It was now not a sportive combat, 

25 but a war to the death. The Roundhead had no better 
quarter to expect from those whom he had persecuted than 
a cruel slave-driver can expect from insurgent slaves still 
bearing the marks of his collars and his scourges. 

The war between wit and Puritanism soon became a war 

30 between wit and morality. The hostility excited by a gro- 
tesque caricature of virtue did not spare virtue herself. 
Whatever the canting Roundhead had regarded with rever- 
ence was insulted. Whatever he had proscribed was fa- 
vored. Because he had been scrupulous about trifles, all 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 113 

scruples were treated with derision, because he had cov- 
ered his failings with the mask of devotion, men were en- 
couraged to obtrude with cynic impudence all their most 
scandalous vices on the public eye. Because he had pun- 
ished illicit love with barbarous severity, virgin purity and 5 
conjugal fidelity were to be made a jest. To that sancti- 
monious jargon, which was his shibboleth, was opposed 
another jargon not less absurd and much more odious. As 
he never opened his mouth except in Scriptural phrase, the 
new breed of wits and fine gentlemen never opened their 10 
mouths without uttering ribaldry of which a porter would 
now be ashamed, and without calling on their Maker to 
curse them, sink them, confound them, blast them, and 
damn them. 

It is not strange, therefore, that our polite literature, 15 
when it revived with the revival of the old civil and ecclesi- 
astical polity, should have been profoundly immoral. A 
few eminent men, who belonged to an earlier and better 
age, were exempt from the general contagion. The verse 
of Waller 118 still breathed the sentiments which had ani- 20 
mated a more chivalrous generation. Cowley, distinguished 
at once as a loyalist and as a man of letters, raised his 
voice courageously against the immorality which disgraced 
both letters and loyalty. A mightier spirit, unsubdued 
by pain, danger, poverty, obloquy, and blindness, medi- 25 
tated, undisturbed by the obscene tumult which raged all 
around, a song so sublime and so holy that it would not 
have misbecome the lips of those ethereal Virtues whom he 
saw, what that inner eye which no calamity could darken, 
Hinging down on the jasper pavement their crowns of 30 
amaranth and gold. nsa The vigorous and fertile genius of 
Butler, 119 if it did not altogether escape the prevailing infec- 
tion, took the disease in a mild form. But these were men 
whose minds had been trained in a world which had passed 



114 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

away. They gave place in no long time to a younger gen- 
eration of poets, and of that generation, from Dryden down 
to Uurfey, the common characteristic was hard-hearted, 
shameless, swaggering licentiousness, at once inelegant and 
5 inhuman. The influence of these writers was doubtless 
noxious, yet less noxious than it would have been had they 
been less depraved. The poison which they administered 
was so strong that it was, in no long time, rejected with 
nausea. None of them understood the dangerous art of 

io associating images of unlawful pleasure with all that is en- 
dearing and ennobling. None of them was aware that a 
certain decorum is essential even to voluptuousness, that 
drapery may be more alluring than exposure, and that the 
imagination may be far more powerfully moved by delicate 

15 hints which impel it to exert itself than by gross descrip- 
tions which it takes in passively. 

The spirit of the Anti-Puritan reaction pervades almoct 
the whole polite literature of the reign of Charles the 
Second. But the very quintessence of that spirit will be 

20 found in the comic drama. The playhouses, shut by the 
meddling fanatic in the day of his power, were again 
crowded. To their old attractions new and more powerful 
attractions had been added. Scenery, dresses, and decora- 
tions such as would now be thought mean and absurd, but 

25 such as would have been esteemed incredibly magnificent 
by those who, early in the seventeenth century, sate on the 
filthy benches of the Hope or under the thatched roof of 
the Rose, dazzled the eyes of the multitude. The fascina- 
tion of sex was called in to aid the fascination of art ; and 

30 the young spectator saw, with emotions unknown to the 
contemporaries of Shakespeare and Jonson, 120 tender and 
sprightly heroines personified by lovely women. 121 From 
the day on which the theatres were reopened they became 
seminaries of vice, and the evil propagated itself. The 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 115 

profligacy of the representations soon drove away sober 
people. The frivolous and dissolute who remained re- 
quired every year stronger and stronger stimulants. Thus 
the artists corrupted the spectators, and the spectators the 
artists, till the turpitude of the drama became such as must 5 
astonish all who are not aware that extreme relaxation is 
the natural effect of extreme restraint, and that an age of 
hypocrisy is, in the regular course of things, followed by an 
age of impudence. 

Nothing is more characteristic of the times than the care 10 
with which the poets contrived to put all their loosest verses 
into the mouths of women. The compositions in which the 
greatest license was taken were the epilogues. They were 
almost always recited by favorite actresses, and nothing 
charmed the depraved audience so much as to hear lines 15 
grossly indecent repeated by a beautiful girl, who was sup- 
posed to have not yet lost her innocence. 

Our theatre was indebted in that age for many plots and 
characters to Spain, to France, and to the old English mas- 
ters ; but whatever our dramatists touched they tainted. In 20 
their imitations the houses of Calderon's 122 stately and high 
spirited Castilian gentlemen became sties of vice, Shakes- 
peare's Viola 123 a procuress, Moliere's misanthrope a rav- 
isher, Moliere's Agnes an adulteress. Nothing could be so 
pure or so heroic but that it became foul and ignoble by 25 
transfusion through those foul and ignoble minds. 

Such was the state of the drama ; and the drama was the 
department of light literature in which a poet had the best 
chance of obtaining a subsistence by his pen. The sale of 
books was so small that a man of the greatest name could 30 
expect only a pittance for the copyright of the best per- 
formance. There cannot be a stronger instance than the 
fate of Dryden's last production, the Fables. That vol- 
ume was published when he was universally admitted to be 



116 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

the chief of living English poets. It contains about twelve 
thousand lines. The versification is admirable, the narra- 
tives and descriptions full of life. To this day Palamon 
and Arcite, Cymon and Ipliigcnia, Theodore and Honor ia 
5 are the delight both of critics and of schoolboys. The 
collection includes Alexander 's Feast, the noblest ode in our 
language. For the copyright Dryden received two hundred 
. and fifty pounds, less than in our days has sometimes been 
paid for two articles in a review. Nor does the bargain 

io seem to have been a hard one. For the book went off 
slowly, and a second edition was not required till the 
author had been ten years in his grave. By writing for the 
theatre it was possible to earn a much larger sum with 
much less trouble. Southern 124 made seven hundred 

15 pounds by one play. Otway 125 was raised from beggary to 
temporary affluence by the success of his Don Carlos. 
Shadwell 12G cleared a hundred and thirty pounds by a single 
representation of the Squire of Alsatia. The consequence 
was that every man who had to live by his wit wrote plays 

20 whether he had any internal vocation to write plays or not. 
It was thus with Dryden. As a satirist he has rivaled 
Juvenal. 127 As a didactic poet he perhaps might, with care 
and meditation, have rivaled Lucretius. 128 Of lyric poets 
he is, if not the most sublime, the most brilliant and spirit- 

25 stirring. But nature, profuse to him of many rare gifts, 
had denied him the dramatic faculty. Nevertheless all the 
energies of his best years were wasted on dramatic com- 
position. He had too much judgment not to be aware that 
in the power of exhibiting character by means of dialogue 

30 he was deficient. That deficiency he did his best to con- 
ceal, sometimes by surprising and amusing incidents, some- 
times by stately declamation, sometimes by harmonious 
numbers, sometimes by ribaldry but too well suited to the 
taste of a profane and licentious pit. Yet he never ob- 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 117 

tained any theatrical success equal to that which rewarded 
the exertions of some men far inferior to him in general 
powers. He thought himself fortunate if he cleared a hun- 
dred guineas by a play ; a scanty remuneration, yet appar- 
ently larger than he could have earned in any other way 5 
by the same quantity of labor. 

The recompense which the wits of that age could obtain 
from the public was so small that they were under the 
necessity of eking out their incomes by levying contribu- 
tions on the great. Every rich and good-natured lord was 10 
pestered by authors with a mendicancy so importune, and a 
flattery so abject, as may in our time seem incredible. The 
patron to whom a work was inscribed was expected to re- 
ward the writer with a purse of gold. The fee paid for the 
dedication of a book was often much larger than the sum 15 
which any bookseller would give for the copyright. Books 
were therefore often printed merely that they might be 
dedicated. This traffic in praise completed the degrada- 
tion of the literary character. Adulation pushed to the 
verge, sometimes of nonsense and sometimes of impiety, 20 
was not thought to disgrace a poet. Independence, verac- 
ity, self-respect, were things not expected by the world 
from him. In truth, he was in morals something between a 
pandar and a beggar. 

To the other vices which degraded the literary character 25 
was added, toward the close of the reign of Charles the 
Second, the most savage intemperance of party spirit. The 
wits, as a class, had been impelled by their old hatred of 
Puritanism to take the side of the court, and had been 
found useful allies. Dryden, in particular, had clone good 3° 
service to the government. His Absalom and AcJiitopJicl, 
the greatest satire of modern times, had amazed the town, 
had made its way with unprecedented rapidity even into 
rural districts, and had, wherever it appeared, bitterly an- 



118 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

noyed the Exclusionists and raised the courage of the 
Tories. But we must not, in the admiration which we 
naturally feel for noble diction and versification, forget the 
great distinctions of good and evil. The spirit by which 

5 Dryden and several of his compeers were at this time ani- 
mated against the Whigs deserves to be called fiendish. 
The servile judges and sheriffs of those evil days could not 
shed blood so fast as the poets cried out for it. Calls for 
more victims, hideous jests on hanging, bitter taunts on 

io those who, having stood by the king in the hour of danger, 
now advised him to deal mercifully and generously by his 
vanquished enemies, were publicly recited on the stage, 
and, that nothing might be wanting to the guilt and the 
shame, were recited by women, who, having long been 

15 taught to discard all modesty, were now taught to discard 
all compassion. 

It is a remarkable fact that, while the lighter literature of 
England was thus becoming a nuisance and a national dis- 
grace, the English genius was effecting in science a revolution 

20 which will, to the end of time, be reckoned among the highest 
achievements of the human intellect. Bacon had sown the 
good seed in a sluggish soil and an ungenial season. He 
had not expected an early crop, and in his last testament 
had solemnly bequeathed his fame to the next age. During 

25 a whole generation his philosophy had, amidst tumults, wars, 
and proscriptions, been slowly ripening in a few well-consti- 
tuted minds. While factions were struggling for dominion 
over each other, a small body of sages had turned away with 
benevolent disdain from the conflict, and had devoted them- 

30 selves to the nobler work of extending the dominion of man 
over matter. As soon as tranquillity was restored, these 
teachers easily found attentive audience. For the discipline 
through which the nation had passed had brought the public 
mind to a temper well fitted for the reception of the Veru- 



ENGLAND IN 1085. 119 

lamian doctrine. 1 "' The civil troubles had stimulated the 
faculties of the educated classes and had called forth a 
restless activity and an insatiable curiosity such as had not 
before been known among us. Yet the effect of those 
troubles had been that schemes of political and religious 5 
reform were generally regarded with suspicion and contempt. 
During twenty years the chief employment of busy and 
ingenious men had been to frame constitutions with first 
magistrates, without first magistrates, with hereditary senates, 
with senates appointed by lot, with annual senates, with per- 10 
petual senates. In these plans nothing was omitted. All 
the detail, all the nomenclature, all the ceremonial of the 
imaginary government was fully set forth — Polemarchs and 
Phylarchs, Tribes and Galaxies, the Lord Archon and the 
Lord Strategus. Which ballot boxes were to be green and 1 5 
which red, which balls were to be of gold and which of 
silver, which magistrates were to wear hats and which black 
velvet caps with peaks, how the mace was to be carried and 
when the heralds were to uncover, — these and a hundred 
more such trifles were gravely considered and arranged by 20 
men of no common capacity and learning. But the time for 
these visions had gone by; and, if any steadfast republican 
still continued to amuse himself with them, fear of public 
derision and of a criminal information generally induced him 
to keep his fancies to himself. It was now unpopular and 25 
unsafe to mutter a word against the fundamental laws of the 
monarchy; but daring and ingenious men might indemnify 
themselves by treating with disdain what had lately been 
considered as the fundamental laws of nature. The torrent 
which had been dammed up in one channel rushed violently 3° 
into another. The revolutionary spirit, ceasing to operate in 
politics, began to exert itself with unprecedented vigor and 
hardihood in every department of physics. The year 1660, 
the era of the restoration of the old constitution, is also the 



120 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

era from which dates the ascendency of the new philosophy. 
In that year the Royal Society, destined to be a chief agent 
in a long series of glorious and salutary reforms, began to 
exist. In a few months experimental science became all 

5 the mode. The transfusion of blood, the ponderation of air, 
the fixation of mercury, succeeded to that place in the public 
mind which had been lately occupied by the controversies 
of the Rota. Dreams of perfect forms of government made 
way for dreams of wings with which men were to fly from the 

io Tower to the Abbey, and of double-keeled ships which were 
never to founder in the fiercest storm. All classes were 
hurried along by the prevailing sentiment. Cavalier and 
Roundhead, Churchman and Puritan were for once allied. 
Divines, jurists, statesmen, nobles, princes swelled the tri- 

15 umph of the Baconian philosophy. Poets sang with emulous 
fervor the approach of the golden age. Cowley, in lines 
weighty with thought and resplendent with wit, urged the 
chosen seed to take possession of the promised land flowing 
with milk and honey, that land which their great deliverer 

20 and lawgiver had seen as from the summit of Pisgah, but 
had not been permitted to enter. Dryden, with more zeal 
than knowledge, joined his voice to the general acclamation, 
and foretold things which neither he nor anybody else 
understood. The Royal Society, he predicted, would soon 

25 lead us to the extreme verge of the globe, and there delight 
us with a better view of the moon.* Two able and aspiring 
prelates, Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, and Wilkins, Bishop of 
Chester, were conspicuous among the leaders of the move- 
ment. Its history was eloquently written by a younger 

3° * " Then we upon the globe's last verge shall go, 

And view the ocean leaning on the sky; 
From thence our rolling neighbors we shall know, 
• And on the lunar world securely pry." 

An fins MirabiltSi 164. 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 121 

divine who was rising to high distinction in his profession, 
Thomas Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester. Both Chief 
Justice Hale and Lord Keeper Guildford stole some hours 
from the business of their courts to write on hydrostatics. 
Indeed it was under the immediate directions of Guildford 5 
that the first barometers ever exposed to sale in London 
were constructed. Chemistry divided, for a time, with wine 
and love, with the stage and the gaming-table, with the 
intrigues of a courtier and the intrigues of a demagogue, the 
attention of the fickle Buckingham. Rupert m has the credit 10 
of having invented mezzotinto, and from him is named that 
curious bubble of glass which has long amused children and 
puzzled philosophers. Charles himself had a laboratory at 
Whitehall, and was far more active and attentive there than 
at the council board. It was almost necessary to the char- 15 
acter of a fine gentleman to have something to say about 
air-pumps and telescopes; and even fine ladies, now and 
then, thought it becoming to affect a taste for science, went 
in coaches and six to visit the Gresham curiosities, and broke 
forth into cries of delight at finding that a magnet really 20 
attracted a needle, and that a microscope really made a fly 
look as large as a sparrow. 

In this, as in every great stir of the human mind, there 
was doubtless something which might well move a smile. It 
is the universal law that whatever pursuit, whatever doctrine 25 
becomes fashionable shall lose a portion of that dignity which 
it had possessed while it was confined to a small but earnest 
minority, and was loved for its own sake alone. It is true 
that the follies of some persons who, without any real aptitude 
for science, professed a passion for it, furnished matter of 3° 
contemptuous mirth to a few malignant satirists who belonged 
to the preceding generation, and were not disposed to unlearn 
the lore of their youth. But it is not less true that the great 
work of interpreting nature was performed by the English of 



122 ENGLAND TN 1685. 

that age as it had never before been performed in any age 
by any nation. The spirit of Francis Bacon was abroad, a 
spirit admirably compounded of audacity and sobriety. There 
was a strong persuasion that the whole world was full of 
5 secrets of high moment to the happiness of man, and that 
man had, by his Maker, been intrusted with the key which, 
rightly used, would give access to them. There was at the 
same time a conviction that in physics it was impossible to 
arrive at the knowledge of general laws except by the care- 

io ful observation of particular facts. Deeply impressed with 
these great truths, the professors of the new philosophy 
applied themselves to their task, and before a quarter of a 
century had expired, they had given ample earnest of what 
has since been achieved. Already a reform of agriculture 

15 had been commenced. New vegetables were cultivated. 
New implements of husbandry were employed. New man- 
ures were applied to the soil. Evelyn 131 had, Under the 
formal sanction of the Royal Society, given instruction to 
his countrymen in planting. Temple, in his intervals of 

20 leisure, had tried many experiments in horticulture, and had 
proved that many delicate fruits, the natives of more favored 
climates, might, with the help of art, be grown on English 
ground. Medicine, which in France was still in abject bond- 
age and afforded an inexhaustible subject of just ridicule 

25 to Moliere, had in England become an experimental and 
progressive science, and every day made some new advance, 
in defiance of Hippocrates and Galen. 132 The attention of 
speculative men had been, for the first time, directed to the 
important subject of sanitary police. The great plague of 

30 1665 induced them to consider with care the defective archi- 
tecture, draining, and ventilation of the capital. The great 
fire of 1666 afforded an opportunity for effecting extensive 
improvements. The whole matter was diligently examined 
by the Royal Society, and to the suggestions of that body 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 123 

must be partly attributed the changes which, though far 
short of what the public welfare required, yet made a wide 
difference between the new and the old London, and prob- 
ably put a final close to the ravages of pestilence in our 
country. At the same time one of the founders of the 5 
society, Sir William Petty, created the science of political 
arithmetic, the humble but indispensable handmaid of polit- 
ical philosophy. To that period belonged the chemical 
discoveries of Boyle and the first botanical researches of 
Sloane. 133 One after another, phantoms which had haunted 10 
the world through ages of darkness fled before the light. 
Astrology and alchemy became jests. Soon there was 
scarcely a county in which some of the quorum did not 
smile contemptuously when an old woman was brought 
before them for riding on broomsticks or giving cattle the 15 
murrain. But it was in those noblest and most arduous 
departments of knowledge in which induction and mathe- 
matical demonstration cooperate for the discovery of truth 
that the English genius won in that age the most memorable 
triumphs. John Wallis placed the whole system of statics 20 
on a new foundation. Edmund Halley investigated the 
properties of the atmosphere, the ebb and flow of the sea, 
the laws of magnetism, and the course of the comets ; nor 
did he shrink from toil, peril, and exile in the cause of sci- 
ence. While he, on the rock of St. Helena, mapped the 25 
constellations of the southern hemisphere, our national 
observatory was rising at Greenwich ; and John Flamsteed, 
the first astronomer royal, was commencing that long series 
of observations which is never mentioned without respect 
and gratitude in any part of the globe. But the glory of 30 
these men, eminent as they were, is cast into the shade by 
the transcendent luster of one immortal name. In Isaac 
Newton two kinds of intellectual power which have little in 
common and which are not often found together in a very 



124 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

high degree of vigor, but which nevertheless are equally 
necessary in the most sublime departments of natural phi- 
losophy, were united as they have never been united before 
or since. There may have been minds as happily constituted 
5 as his for the cultivation of pure mathematical science; there 
may have been minds as happily constituted for the cultiva- 
tion of science purely experimental; but in no other mind 
have the demonstrative faculty and the inductive faculty 
coexisted in such supreme excellence and perfect harmony. 

io Perhaps in an age of Scotists and Thomists 1?A even his 
intellect might have run to waste, as many intellects ran to 
waste which were inferior only to his. Happily the spirit of 
the age on which his lot was cast gave the right direction to 
his mind; and his mind reacted with tenfold force on the 

15 spirit of the age. In the year 1685 his fame, though splen- 
did, was only dawning ; but his genius was in the meridian. 
His great work, that work which effected a revolution in the 
most important provinces of natural philosophy, had been 
completed, but was not yet published, and was just about to 

20 be submitted to the consideration of the Royal Society. 

It is not very easy to explain why the nation which was so 
far before its neighbors in science should in art have been 
far behind them all. Yet such was the fact. It is true that 
in architecture, an art which is half a science, an art in which 

25 none but a geometrician can excel, an art which has no 
standard of grace but what is directly or indirectly dependent 
on utility, an art of which the creations derive apart, at least, 
of their majesty from mere bulk, our country could boast of 
one truly great man, Christopher Wren; ir ' r> and the fire which 

3° laid London in ruins had given him an opportunity, unprece- 
dented in modern history, of displaying his powers. The 
austere beauty of the Athenian portico, the gloomy sublimity 
of the Gothic arcade, he was, like almost all his contempo- 
raries, incapable of emulating, and perhaps incapable of 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 125 

appreciating; but no man, born on our side of the Alps, has 
imitated with so much success the magnificence of the palace- 
like churches of Italy. Even the superb Louis m has left to 
posterity no work which can bear a comparison with Saint 
Paul's. But at the close of the reign of Charles the Second 5 
there was not a single English painter or statuary whose 
name is now remembered. This sterility is somewhat myste- 
rious, for painters and statuaries were by no means a despised 
or an ill-paid class. Their social position was at least as 
high as at present. Their gains, when compared with the 10 
wealth of the nation and with the remuneration of other 
descriptions of intellectual labor, were even larger than at 
present. Indeed, the munificent patronage which was ex- 
tended to artists drew them to our shores in multitudes. 
Lely, 137 who has preserved to us the rich curls, the full lips, 15 
and the languishing eyes of the frail beauties celebrated by 
Hamilton, 1 ' 18 was a Westphalian. He had died in 1680, hav- 
ing long lived splendidly, having received the honor of knight- 
hood, and having accumulated a good estate out of the fruits 
of his skill. His noble collection of drawings and pictures 20 
was, after his decease, exhibited by the royal permission in 
the Banqueting House at Whitehall, and sold by auction for 
the almost incredible sum of twenty-six thousand pounds, a 
sum which bore a greater proportion to the fortunes of the 
rich men of that day than a hundred thousand pounds would 25 
bear to the fortunes of the rich men of our time. Lely was 
succeeded by his countryman Godfrey Kneller, 139 who was 
made first a knight and then a baronet, and who, after keep- 
ing up a sumptuous establishment, and after losing much 
money by unlucky speculations, was still able to bequeath a 30 
large fortune to his family. The two Vandeveldes, natives 
of Holland, had been induced by English liberality to settle 
here, and had produced for the king and his nobles some of 
the finest sea-pieces in the world. Another Dutchman, 



126 ENGLAND IN 1865. 

Simon Varelst, painted glorious sunflowers and tulips for 
prices such as had never before been known. Verrio, a 
Neapolitan, covered ceilings and staircases with Gorgons and 
Muses, Nymphs and Satyrs, Virtues and Vices, Gods quaffing 

5 nectar, and laureled princes riding in triumph. The income 
which he derived from his performances enabled him to keep 
one of the most expensive tables in England. For his pieces 
at Windsor alone he received seven thousand pounds, a sum 
then sufficient to make a gentleman of moderate wishes per- 

io fectly easy for life, a. sum greatly exceeding all that Dryden, 
during a literary life of forty years, obtained from the 
booksellers. Verrio's chief assistant and successor, Lewis 
Laguerre, came from France. The two most celebrated 
sculptors of that day were also foreigners. Gibber, whose 

15 pathetic emblems of Fury and Melancholy still adorn Bedlam, 
was a Dane. Gibbons, to whose graceful fancy and delicate 
touch many of our palaces, colleges, and churches owe their 
finest decorations, was a Dutchman. Even the designs for 
the coin were made by French medalists. Indeed, it was 

20 not till the reign of George the Second that our country 
could glory in a great painter, and George the Third was on 
the throne before she had reason to be proud of any of her 
sculptors. 

It is time that this description of the England which 

25 Charles the Second governed should draw to a close. Yet 
one subject of the highest moment still remains untouched. 
Nothing has as yet been said of the great body of the people, 
of those who held the ploughs, who tended the oxen, who 
toiled at the looms of Norwich, and squared the Portland 

30 stone for Saint Paul's. Nor can very much be said. The 
most numerous class is precisely the class respecting which 
we have the most meagre information. In those times 
philanthropists did not yet regard it as a sacred duty, nor 
had demagogues yet found it a lucrative trade, to expatiate 



ENGLAND IN 16S5. 127 

on the distress of the laborer. History was too much occu- 
pied with courts and camps to spare a line for the hut of the 
peasant or for the garret of the mechanic. The press now 
often sends forth in a day a greater quantity of discussion 
and declamation about the condition of the working man 5 
than was published during the twenty-eight years which 
elapsed between the Restoration and the Revolution. But 
it would be a great error to infer from the increase of com- 
plaint that there has been any increase of misery. 

The great criterion of the state of the common people is 10 
the amount of their wages; and as four-fifths of the common 
people were, in the seventeenth century, employed in agri- 
culture, it is especially important to ascertain what were then 
the wages of agricultural industry. On this subject we have 
the means of arriving at conclusions sufficiently exact for 15 
our purpose. 

Sir William Petty, whose mere assertion carries great 
weight, informs us that a laborer was by no means in the 
lowest state who received for a day's work fourpence with 
food or eightpence without food. Four shillings a week, 20 
therefore, were, according to Petty's calculation, fair agri- 
cultural wages. 

That this calculation was not remote from the truth we 
have abundant proof. About the beginning of the year 1685, 
the justices of Warwickshire, in the exercise of a power 25 
intrusted to them by an act of Elizabeth, fixed, at their 
quarter sessions, a scale of wages for their county, and noti- 
fied that every employer who gave more than the authorized 
sum and every working man who received more would be 
liable to punishment. The wages of the common agricultural 3° 
laborer, from March to September, they fixed at the precise 
sum mentioned by Petty, namely, four shillings a week with- 
out food. From September to March the wages were to be 
only three and sixpence a week. 



128 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

But in that age, as in ours, the earnings of the peasant 
were very different in different parts of the kingdom. The 
wages of Warwickshire were probably about the average, and 
those of the counties near the Scottish border below it. But 
5 there were more favored districts. In the same year, 1685, 
a gentleman of Devonshire, named Richard Dunning, pub- 
lished a small tract, in which he described the condition of 
the poor of that county. That he understood his subject 
well it is impossible to doubt ; for a few months later his 

10 work was reprinted, and was, by the magistrates assembled 
in quarter sessions at Exeter, strongly recommended to the 
attention of all parochial officers. According to him, the 
wages of the Devonshire peasant were, without food, about 
five shillings a week. 

15 Still better was the condition of the laborer in the neigh- 
borhood of Bury St. Edmund's. The magistrates of Suffolk 
met there in the spring of 1682 to fix a rate of wages, and 
resolved that, where the laborer was not boarded, he should 
have five shillings a week in winter and six in summer. 

20 In 1 66 1 the justices at Chelmsford had fixed the wages 
of the Essex laborer, who was not boarded, at six shillings in 
winter and seven in summer. This seems to have been the 
highest remuneration given in the kingdom for agricultural 
labor between the Restoration and the Revolution; and it 

25 is to be observed that, in the year in which this order was 
made, the necessaries of life were immoderately dear. Wheat 
was at seventy shillings the quarter, which would even now 
be considersd as almost a famine price. 

These facts are in perfect accordance with another fact 

30 which seems to deserve consideration. It is evident that, in 
a country where no man can be compelled to become a 
soldier, the ranks of an army cannot be filled if the govern- 
ment offers much less than the wages of common rustic labor. 
At present the pay and beer money of a private in a regiment 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 129 

of the line amount to seven shillings and sevenpence a week. 
This stipend, coupled with the hope of a pension, does not 
attract the English youth in sufficient numbers ; and it is 
found necessary to supply the deficiency by enlisting largely 
from among the poorer population of Munster and Connaught. 5 
The pay of the private foot soldier in 1685 was only four 
shillings and eightpence a week; yet it is certain that the 
government in that year found no difficulty in obtaining many 
thousands of English recruits at very short notice. The pay 
of the private foot soldier in the army of the Commonwealth 10 
had been seven shillings a week, that is to say, as much as a 
corporal received under Charles the Second; and seven shil- 
lings a week had been found sufficient to fill the ranks with 
men decidedly superior to the generality of the people. On 
the whole, therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that, in 15 
the reign of Charles the Second, the ordinary wages of the 
peasant did not exceed four shillings a week; but that, in 
some parts of the kingdom, five shillings, six shillings, and, 
during the summer months, even seven shillings were paid. 
At present a district where a laboring man earns only seven 20 
shillings a week is thought to be in a state shocking to 
humanity. The average is very much higher; and in pros- 
perous counties, the weekly wages of husbandmen amount 
to twelve, fourteen, and even sixteen shillings. 

The remuneration of workmen employed in manufactures 25 
has always been higher than that of the tillers of the soil. 
In the year 1680 a member of the House of Commons 
remarked that the high wages paid in this country made it 
impossible for our textures to maintain a competition with 
the produce of the Indian looms. An English mechanic, he 3° 
said, instead of slaving like a native of Bengal for a piece 
of copper, exacted a shilling a day. Other evidence is 
extant, which proves that a shilling a day was the pay to 
which the English manufacturer then thought himself en- 



130 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

titled, but that he was often forced to work for less. The 
common people of that age were not in the habit of meeting 
for public discussion or haranguing or of petitioning par- 
liament. No newspaper pleaded their cause. It was in rude 
5 rhyme that their love and hatred, their exultation and their 
distress found utterance. A great part of their history is to 
be learned only from their ballads. One of the most remark- 
able of the popular lays chanted about the streets of Norwich 
and Leeds in the time of Charles the Second may still be 

io read on the original broadside. It is the vehement and 
bitter cry of labor against capital. It describes the good old 
times when every artisan employed in the woolen manufac- 
ture lived as well as a farmer. But those times were past. 
Sixpence a day now was all that could be earned by hard 

15 labor at the loom. If the poor complained that they could 
not live on such a pittance, they were told that they were 
free to take it or leave it. For so miserable a recompense 
were the producers of wealth compelled to toil, rising early 
and lying down late, while the master clothier, eating, sleep- 

20 ing, and idling, became rich by their exertions. A shilling 
a day, the poet declares, is what the weaver would have if 
justice were done.* We may therefore conclude that, in the 

*This ballad is in the British Museum. The precise year is not 
given, but the imprimatur of Roger Lestrange fixes the date sufficiently 
25 for my purpose. I will quote some of the lines. The master clothier 
is introduced speaking as follows: 

" In former ages we used to give, 
So that our workfolks like farmers did live; 
But the times are changed, we will make them know. 



30 We will make them to work hard for sixpence a clay, 

Though a shilling they deserve if they had their just pay; 
If at all they murmur and say, 'tis too small, 
We bid them choose whether they'll work at all. 



ENGLAND IN 1685 131 

generation which preceded the Revolution, a workman em- 
ployed in the great staple manufacture of England thought 
himself fairly paid if he gained six shillings a week. 

It may here be noticed that the practice of setting chil- 
dren prematurely to work, a practice which the state, the 5 
legitimate protector of those who cannot protect themselves, 
has, in our time, wisely and humanely interdicted, prevailed 
in the seventeenth century to an extent which, when com- 
pared with the extent of the manufacturing system, seems 
almost incredible. At Norwich, the chief seat of the cloth- 10 
ing trade, a little creature of six years old was thought fit 
for labor. Several writers of that time, and among them 
some who were considered as eminently benevolent, mention, 
with exultation, the fact that in that single city boys and 
girls of tender age created wealth exceeding what was nee- 15 
essary for their own subsistence by twelve thousand pounds 
a year. The more carefully we examine the history of the 
past, the more reason shall we find to dissent from those 
who imagine that our age has been fruitful of new social 
evils. The truth is that the evils are, with scarcely an 20 
exception, old. That which is new is the intelligence which 
discerns and the humanity which remedies them. 

When we pass from the weavers of cloth to a different 
class of artisans, our inquiries will still lead us to nearly the 
same conclusions. During several generations, the Commis- 25 
sioners of Greenwich Hospital have kept a register of the 
wages paid to different classes of workmen who have been 
employed in the repairs of the building. From this valuable 

And thus we do gain all our wealth and estate, 

By many poor men that work early and late. 30 

Then hey for the clothing trade ! It goes on brave. 

We scorn for to toyl and moyl, nor yet to slave. 

Our workmen do work hard, but we live at ease, 

We go when we will, and we come when we please." 



132 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

record it appears that, in the course of a hundred and twenty 
years, the daily earnings of the bricklayer have risen from 
half a crown to four and tenpence, those of the mason 
from half a crown to five and threepence, those of the car- 
5 penter from half a crown to five and fivepence, and those of 
the plumber from three shillings to five and sixpence. 

It seems clear, therefore, that the wages of labor, esti- 
mated in money, were, in 1685, not more than half of what 
they now are ; and there were few articles important to the 

10 working man of which the price was not, in 1685, more 
than half of what it now is. Beer was undoubtedly much 
cheaper in that age than at present. Meat was also cheaper, 
but was still so dear that there were hundreds of thousands 
of families who scarcely knew the taste of it.* In the cost 

15 of wheat there has been very little change. The average 
price of the quarter, during the last twelve years of Charles 
the Second, was fifty shillings. Bread, therefore, such as is 
now given to the inmates of a workhouse, was then seldom 
seen, even on the trencher of a yeoman or of a shopkeeper. 

20 The great majority of the nation lived almost entirely on 
rye, barley, and oats. 

The produce of tropical countries, the produce of the 
mines, the produce of machinery, was positively dearer than 
at present. Among the commodities for which the laborer 

25 would have had to pay higher in 1685 than his posterity pay 
in 1848 were sugar, salt, coals, candles, soap, shoes, stock- 
ings, and^ generally all articles of clothing and all articles of 
bedding. It may be added that the old coats and blankets 
would have been, not only more costly, but less serviceable 

30 than the modern fabrics. 

* King in his Natural and Political Conclusions roughly estimated 
the common people of England at 880,000 families. Of these families 
440,000, according to him, ate animal food twice a week. The remain- 
ing 440,000 ate it not at all, or at most not oftener than once a week. 



ENGLAND IN His.',. 133 

It must be remembered that those laborers who were able 
to maintain themselves and their families by means of wages 
were not the most necessitous members of the community. 
Beneath them lay a large class which could not subsist with- 
out some aid from the parish. There can hardly be a more 5 
important test of the condition of the common people than 
the ratio which this class bears to the whole society. At 
present the men, women, and children who receive relief 
are, in bad years, one-tenth of the inhabitants of England 
and, in good years, one-thirteenth. Gregory King esti- 10 
mated them in his time at more than a fifth; and this esti- 
mate, which all our respect for his authority will scarcely 
prevent us from calling extravagant, was pronounced by 
Davenant eminently judicious. 

We are not quite without the means of forming an esti- 15 
mate for ourselves. The poor rate was undoubtedly the 
heaviest tax borne by our ancestors in those days. It was 
computed, in the reign of Charles the Second, at near seven 
hundred thousand pounds a year, much more than the prod- 
uce either of the excise or of the customs, and little less 20 
than half the entire revenue of the crown. The poor rate 
went on increasing rapidly, and appears to have risen in a 
short time to between eight and nine hundred thousand a 
year, that is to say, to one-sixth of what it now is. The 
population was then less than a third of what it now is. The 25 
minimum of wages, estimated in money, was half of what it 
now is; and we can therefore hardly suppose that the aver- 
age allowance made to a pauper can have been more than 
half of what it now is. It seems to follow that the propor- 
tion of the English people which received parochial relief 3° 
then must have been larger than the proportion which 
receives relief now. It is good to speak on such questions 
with diffidence; but it has certainly never yet been proved 
that pauperism was a less heavy burden or a less serious 



134 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

social evil during the last quarter of the seventeenth century 
than it has been in our own time. 

In one respect it must be admitted that the progress of 
civilization has diminished the physical comforts of a por- 
5 tion of the poorest class. It has already been mentioned 
that, before the Revolution, many thousands of square miles, 
now enclosed and cultivated, were marsh, forest, and heath. 
Of this wild land much was, by law, common, and much of 
what was not common by law was worth so little that the 

io proprietors suffered it to be common in fact. In such a 
tract, squatters and trespassers were tolerated to an extent 
now unknown. The peasant who dwelt there could, at little 
or no charge, procure occasionally some palatable addition 
to his hard fare, and provide himself with fuel for the winter. 

15 He kept a flock of geese on what is now an orchard rich 
with apple blossoms. He snared wild fowl on the fen which 
has long since been drained and divided into corn-fields and 
turnip-fields. He cut turf among the furze-bushes on the 
moor, which is now a meadow bright with clover and re- 

20 nowned for butter and cheese. The progress of agriculture 
and the increase of population necessarily deprived him of 
these privileges. But against this disadvantage a long list 
of advantages is to be set off. Of the blessings which civi- 
lization and philosophy bring with them a large proportion 

25 is common to all ranks, and would, if withdrawn, be missed 
as painfully by the laborer as by the peer. The market- 
place which the rustic can now reach with his cart in an 
hour was, a hundred and sixty years ago, a day's journey 
from him. The street which now affords to the artisan, 

30 during the whole night, a secure, a convenient, and a bril- 
liantly lighted walk was, a hundred and sixty years ago, so 
dark after sunset that he would not have been able to see 
his hand, so ill paved that he would have run constant risk 
of breaking his neck, and so ill watched that he would have 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 135 

been in imminent danger of being knocked down and plun- 
dered of his small earnings. Every bricklayer who falls 
from a scaffold, every sweeper of a crossing who is run over 
by a carriage now may have his wounds dressed and his 
limbs set with a skill such as, a hundred and sixty years 5 
ago, all the wealth of a great lord like Ormond or of a mer- 
chant prince like Clayton could not have purchased. Some 
frightful diseases have been extirpated by science, and some 
have been banished by police. The term of human life has 
been lengthened over the whole kingdom, and especially in 10 
the towns. The year 1685 was not accounted sickly; yet 
in the year 1685 more than one in twenty-three of the in- 
habitants of the capital died. At present, only one inhabi- 
tant of the capital in forty dies annually. The difference in 
salubrity between the London of the nineteenth century and 1 5 
the London of the seventeenth century is very far greater 
than the difference between London in an ordinary season 
and London in the cholera. 

Still more important is the benefit which all orders of 
society, and especially the lower orders, have derived from 20 
the mollifying influence of civilization on the national char- 
acter. The groundwork of that character has indeed been 
the same through many generations, in the sense in which 
the groundwork of the character of an individual maybe said 
to be the same when he is a rude and thoughtless schoolboy 25 
and when he is a refined and accomplished man. It is 
pleasing to reflect that the public mind of England has soft- 
ened while it has ripened, and that we have, in the course 
of ages, become not only a wiser, but also a kinder people. 
There is scarcely a page of the history or lighter literature 30 
of the seventeenth century which does not contain some 
proof that our ancestors were less humane than their pos- 
terity. The discipline of workshops, of schools, of private 
families, though not more efficient than at present, was infi- 



136 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

nitely harsher. Masters, well born and bred, were in the 
habit of beating their servants. Pedagogues knew no way 
of imparting knowledge but by beating their pupils. Hus- 
bands, of decent station, were not ashamed to beat their 
5 wives. The implacability of hostile factions was such as we 
can scarcely conceive. Whigs were disposed to murmur 
because Stafford 140 was suffered to die without seeing his 
bowels burned before his face. Tories reviled and insulted 
Russell 141 as his coach passed from the Tower to the scaffold 

io in Lincoln's Inn Fields. As little mercy was shown by the 
populace to sufferers of an humbler rank. If an offender 
was put into the pillory, it was well if he escaped with life 
from the shower of brickbats and paving stones. If he was 
tied to the cart's tail, the crowd pressed round him, implor- 

15 ing the hangman to give it to the fellow well, and make him 
howl. Gentlemen arranged parties of pleasure to Bridewell 
on court days, for the purpose of seeing the wretched women 
who beat hemp there whipped. A man pressed to death 
for refusing to plead, a woman burned for coining excited 

20 less sympathy than is now felt for a galled horse or an over- 
driven ox. Fights, compared with which a boxing match is 
a refined and humane spectacle, were among the favorite 
diversions of a large part of the town. Multitudes as- 
sembled to see gladiators hack each other to pieces with 

25 deadly weapons, and shouted with delight when one of the 
combatants lost a finger or an eye. The prisons were hells 
on earth, seminaries of every crime and of every disease. 
At the assizes the lean and yellow culprits brought with 
them from their cells to the dock an atmosphere of stench 

30 and pestilence which sometimes avenged them signally on 
bench, bar, and jury. But on all this misery society looked 
with profound indifference. 142 Nowhere could be found that 
sensitive and restless compassion which has, in our time, ex- 
tended a powerful protection to the factory child, to the 



ENGLAND IN 1685. 137 

Hindoo widow, to the negro slave, which pries into the stores 
and water-casks of every emigrant ship, which winces at 
every lash laid on the back of a drunken soldier, which will 
not suffer the thief in the hulks to be ill fed or overworked, 
and which has repeatedly endeavored to save the life even 5 
of the murderer. It is true that compassion ought, like all 
other feelings, to be under the government of reason, and 
has, for want of such government, produced some ridiculous 
and some deplorable effects. But the more we study the 
annals of the past, the more shall we rejoice that we live in 10 
a merciful age, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred, and 
in which pain, even when deserved, is inflicted reluctantly 
and from a sense of duty. Every class doubtless has gained 
largely by this great moral change; but the class which has 
gained most is the poorest, the most dependent, and the 15 
most defenceless. 

The general effect of the evidence which has been sub- 
mitted to the reader seems hardly to admit of doubt. Yet, 
in spite of evidence, many will still image to themselves the 
England of the Stuarts as a more pleasant country than the 20 
England in which we live. It may at first sight seem strange 
that society, while constantly moving forward with eager 
speed, should be constantly looking backward with tender 
regret. But these two propensities, inconsistent as they may 
appear, can easily be resolved into the same principle. Both 25 
spring from our impatience of the state in which we actually 
are. That impatience, while it stimulates us to surpass pre- 
ceding generations, disposes us to overrate their happiness. 
It is, in some sense, unreasonable and ungrateful in us to be 
constantly discontented with a condition which is constantly 3° 
improving. But, in truth, there is constant improvement pre- 
cisely because there is constant discontent. If we were per- 
fectly satisfied with the present, we should cease to contrive, 
to labor, and to save with a view to the future. And it is 



138 ENGLAND IN 1685. 

natural that, being dissatisfied with the present, we should 
form a too favorable estimate of the past. 

In truth we are under a deception similar to that which 
misleads the traveler in the Arabian desert. Beneath the 
5 caravan all is dry and bare ; but far in advance and far in 
the rear is the semblance of refreshing waters. The pilgrims 
hasten forward and find nothing but sand where, an hour 
before, they had seen a lake. They turn their eyes and see 
a lake where, an hour before, they were toiling through 

io sand. A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through 
every stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism 
to the highest degrees of opulence and civilization. But if 
we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it 
recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It 

15 is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in 
times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want 
of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when 
farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very 
sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, 

20 when men died faster in the purest country air than they 
now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when 
men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die 
on the coast of Guiana. We too shall, in our turn, be out- 
stripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the 

25 twentieth century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think 
himself miserably paid with fifteen shillings a week; that the 
carpenter at Greenwich may receive ten shillings a day; that 
laboring men may be as little used to dine without meat as 
they now are to eat rye bread; that sanitary police and medi- 

30 cal discoveries may have added several more years to the 
average length of human life; that numerous comforts and 
luxuries which are now unknown, or confined to a few, may 
be within the reach of every diligent and thrifty working 
man. And yet it may then be the mode to assert that the 



ENGLAND IN 1686. 139 

increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefited 
the few at the expense of the many, and to talk of the reign 
of Queen Victoria as the time when England was truly merry 
England, when all classes were bound together by brotherly 
sympathy, when the rich did not grind the faces of the poor, 5 
and when the poor did not envy the splendor of the rich. 



NOTES. 



This account, which is the third chapter of Macaulay's M History of 
England," is a general statement of the condition of the country, not only 
in the year 1685, but during the reign of Charles II. It is of especial 
interest when contrasted with the present century on the one hand or with 
the time of Elizabeth on the other. A book like Huxley's " Advance of 
Science" gives a view of England in the middle of this century, while 
Froude's " English Seamen " shows much of the condition of the kingdom 
in the sixteenth. 

1. Charles II returned to England and took possession of the throne 
that had been his father's, in 1660. This is called the Restoration. He 
died in 1685, and was succeeded by his brother under the title of James II. 
2. The Plantagenets were Henry II, 1154-1189; Richard I, 11S9-1199; 
John, 1199-1216; Henry III, 1216-1272; Edward I, 1272-1307; Edward 
II, 1307-1327; Edward III, 1327-1377 ; Richard II, 1377-1399- The 
Tudors were Henry VII, 1485-1509; Henry VIII, 1509-1547; Edward VI, 
1 547-1 553; Mary (called Bloody), 1553-1559; Elizabeth, 1 559-1603. The 
Stuarts were James I, 1603-1625; Charles I, 1625-1649; Charles II, 1660- 
1685; James II, 1685-1701.* The passage amounts to the statement 
that the wealth of England was greater in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 
turies than from the twelfth to the fourteenth ; greater in the seventeenth 
than in the sixteenth. 

3. The Long Parliament assembled in 1640, and continued through the 
remaining years of Charles I, through the Commonwealth and Protecto- 
rate, being dissolved only in the year of the Restoration, 1660. 

4. The Great Plague devastated London in 1665. A hundred thou- 
sand persons are said to have died of it in six months. In 1666 the Great 
Fire burned September 2-6, destroying eighty-nine churches, including 
St. Paul's Cathedral, and more than thirteen hundred dwellings, — two- 
thirds of the entire city in all. 

5. A clerk whose duty it is to record the acts of a legislative body. 

" Throughout these notes the dates in the case of sovereigns are those of the beginning 
and end of reign. 



142 NOTES. 

6. Written in 1848. 

7. Moss-troopers, a term applied to the maurauders who lived near the 
borders of England and Scotland, plundering across the line. The name 
comes from the mosses or bogs through which they made their way by- 
paths known only to themselves. 

8. George III, 1 760-1820. 

g. "The Duke [of Northumberland] tells me his people in Keeldai 
were all quite wild the first time his father went up to shoot there. The 
women had no other dress than a bed-gown and petticoat. The men were 
savage and could hardly be brought to rise from the heath, either from sul- 
lenness or fear. They sang a wild tune, the burden of which was Ourina, 
oufina, ourina. The females sang, the men danced round, and at a cer- 
tain part of the tune they drew their dirks, which they always wore." — 
Sir Walter Scott, " Journal," October 7, 1827. 

10. Hearth-money, or chimney-money, was a tax of a crown for each 
chimney in a house. 

11. The Cabal (1 667-1 673) was the name given to a ministry formed 
in the reign of Charles II. The word means a secret committee, and, 
rather curiously, the initials of the members of this ministry formed the 
word : Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley-Cooper (Lord Shaftes- 
bury), and Lauderdale. They agreed in wishing to strengthen the power 
of the king. Cabal has since their time, in the words of Macaulay, " never 
been used except as a term of reproach." 

12. Thomas Osborne, afterward Duke of Leeds, was successively Treas- 
urer, Privy Councillor, and Lord High Treasurer under Charles II, being at 
the time Earl of Danby. He was afterwards Prime Minister under William. 
He was twice impeached for corruption, but managed to escape conviction, 
although it was proved that he had received a bribe of 5500 guineas from 
the East India Company. He died in 171 2. 

13. The Revolution. The expulsion of James II, and the seating of 
William and Mary on the throne in 168S-16S9. 

14. Henry IV of France, founder of the Bourbon dynasty, 1 589-1610. 
Philip II of Spain, 1 556-1 59S, husband of Mary, Queen of England. 

15. Parma, Duke of, Alessandro Farnese, general of Philip II in the 
Netherlands. Died, 1592. 

16. Spinola, Spanish general. Died, 1630. 

17. Richelieu, Cardinal de, Prime Minister of Louis XIII of France. 
Died, 1642. 

18. Fairfax, Lord Thomas, English Parliamentary general under Crom- 
well. Died, 167 1. Cromwell, Oliver, Puritan general, at the head of the 
government from the defeat of Charles I, and Lord Protector, 1653-1658. 



NOTES. 143 

19. Vauban, French military engineer. Died, 1707. 

20. Louis XIV of France, called the Great, 1643-1715. 

21. The name Cavaliers was given to the party of Charles I, as distin- 
guished from the Roundheads, or Puritans. In the civil war which resulted 
in the execution of Charles I, the soldiers of Cromwell committed many 
excesses upon the possessions of the Royalists and upon the established 
churches. 

22. Fifth Monarchy men were an extreme sect of the period of the 
Puritan Revolution, largely found in Cromwell's army, and believing that 
his government was the beginning of the " Fifth Monarchy," in which 
Christ was to return to the earth. The other four monarchies wen- the 
Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman. 

23. Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, son of William the Silent, 
Dutch general. Died, 1625. 

24. Ossory, Lord, Irish general. 

25. Naseby, battle of. One of the decisive engagements in the struggle 
of Charles I against Parliament. It was fought on July 14, 1645, and 
resulted in the complete victory of the Parliamentary troops under Fairfax 
and Cromwell. 

26. Five years later, September 3, 1650, the Parliamentarians under 
Cromwell, Monk, and Lambert defeated the Scots, the champions of 
Charles II, at Dunbar. It was on this occasion, when the sun scattered 
the mist and showed the rout of the enemy, that Cromwell uttered his 
famous quotation : " Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered." 

27. The Spanish Armada was the mighty fleet sent out by Philip II of 
Spain against England in 1588. Broken by the English fleet in the Chan- 
nel, it was afterwards scattered by storm and completely destroyed. An 
excellent account of the whole matter will be found in Froude's " English 
Seamen in the Sixteenth Century." 

28. Blake, Robert, English admiral, 1 597-1657. 

29. Pepys, Samuel, Secretary of the English Navy under Charles II. 
He left a diary in shorthand, which has since been deciphered, and which 
is one of the most famous works of its kind in existence. It gives a very 
vivid and intimate picture of the court of Charles II. 

30. Cimon was an Athenian commander, son of Miltiades. Died, 
4 |<) B.C. Lysander, a Spartan commander, killed, 395 B.C. Pompey, a 
Roman general, triumvir with Caesar and Crassus, murdered in Egypt, 
48 B.C. Agrippa, Roman commander, died, 12 B.C. 

31. Flodden Field, 1513. James IV of Scotland overwhelmed by the 
English. 

32. Jarnac, a town in western France, where in 1569 the Huguenots, 



144 NOTES. 

the French Protestants, were defeated by the troops of Charles IX, com- 
manded by his brother, afterward Henry III. Moncontour, another battle 
where the Huguenots were again defeated in the same year. 

33. Louis, Prince of Conde. 

34. John of Austria, Don, Spanish commander, half-brother of Philip 
II. Died, 1578. 

35. Charles Howard, English admiral. Died, 1624. 

36. Sir Walter Raleigh, favorite of Queen Elizabeth, navigator, dis- 
coverer, and author. His greatest work was a " History of the World," 
written in the Tower, and left unfinished. Beheaded under James I, 161 8. 

37. Two generals in the Parliamentary army in the struggle against 
Charles I. 

38. Formerly the Thames was much used as a thoroughfare, and the 
palace of Whitehall had a boat-landing on the river. 

39. Hampton Court, a palace originally built by Cardinal Wolsey, is a 
dozen miles southwest of London. It was by him presented to Henry 
VIII. It has since been occupied by Cromwell, the Stuarts, William III, 
and the first two Georges. It contains a fine collection of pictures, and is 
much visited. 

40. Sir John Narborough, English naval officer and discoverer. He 
suppressed the pirates of Tripoli in 1675. Died, 1688. Sir Cloudesley 
Shovel, English admiral. Drowned, 1707. 

41. Smollett, Tobias George, English novelist and historian, 1721-1771. 
His best-known novels are " The Adventures of Roderick Random," " The 
Adventures of Peregrine Pickle," and "The Expedition of Humphry 
Clinker." His novels are full of vigor and movement, but are very coarse. 

42. " Poundage ... an allowance or abatement of twelve Tence in the 
Pound, upon the receipt of a Summ of Money." — E. Phillips, 1706. 

43. The groom of the stole is the first lord of the bedchamber in the 
English royal household. 

44. Salisbury Plain, an immense rolling down near the city of Salis- 
bury. In the midst of it stands the famous ancient ruin called- Stonehenge. 

45. John Evelyn, in his Diary, writes, June 2, 1676: "I went with my 
Lord Chamberlaine to see a garden in Enfield town; thence to see Mr. 
Sec. Coventry's lodge in the Chace. It is a very pretty place, the house 
commodious, the gardens handsome, and our entertainment very free, 
there being none but my Lord and myself. That which I most wondered 
at was that in the compass of 25 miles, yet within 14 of London, there is 
not a house, barn, church, or building, beside three lodges. To this lodge 
are three great ponds and some few enclousures, the rest a solitary desert, 
yet stored with not less than 3000 deer." 



NOTES. 145 

46. Queen Anne, the daughter of James II, reigned from 1702 until 
1714. 

47. As George II came to the throne in 1727, the time to the writing 
of this history would be practically about a hundred and twenty years. 

48. A book in which were entered the expenses of the household of the 
Duke of Northumberland in the fifteenth century. 

49. The Rock of Gibraltar and the two hills of the African side of the 
strait, so called from the old belief that Hercules set them up to mark the 
western limit of his travels when he went for the apples of Hesperides. 

50. Two of the mistresses of Charles II. To both of them he gave 
large sums. Nell Gwynn was a popular actress, and the last words of the 
king were : " Don't let poor Nelly starve." 

51. Glastonbury Abbey is said to be the only religious foundation in 
England which has kept its existence from Roman times. It was tradition- 
ally said to be the burial place of King Arthur and of St. Patrick, as well 
as undoubtedly containing the tomb of St. Dunstan. It was up to the 
Reformation a see of great wealth and importance. Its last abbot was by 
order of Henry VIII hanged. 

52. Reading, the chief town in Berkshire, comes into history with a 
battle in 871, in which Ethelred, the father of Alfred, was defeated. 
Henry I founded here a great monastery in which he was afterward buried. 
The see was, like Glastonbury, of great importance, wealth, and influence, 
until the monasteries were overthrown under Henry VIII. 

53. William of Wykeham was Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor 
under Edward III. He was driven from court on false charges, but after- 
ward restored to honor. He retired in 1391 to private life, and founded 
New College, Oxford. He was a man so blameless of life that a contem- 
porary said of him that to attempt to find a fairlt in him was like endeavor- 
ing to find a knot in a rush. Died, 1404. 

54. William of Waynflete was also Bishop of Winchester and Chan- 
cellor ; but in the fifteenth century. He founded Magdalen College, Ox- 
ford. He was the warm friend of Henry VI. Died, i486. 

55. The high intellectual and moral worth of the men by whom Queen 
Klizabeth was surrounded was by no means the least brilliant feature of 
her time. William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, was Secretary of State under 
Edward IV, and reassumed the office almost immediately when Elizabeth 
succeeded Mary. For forty years he enjoyed the confidence of the astute 
Elizabeth, and richly deserved it. He died in 1598. Sir Nicholas Bacon, 
the father of Sir Francis, was Elizabeth's Lord-Keeper of the Great Seal. 
His son described him as "a plain man, direct and constant, without all 
finesse and doubleness." He died 1579. Roger Ascham was tutor to 



146 NOTES. 

Elizabeth, and an author of learning and distinction. He was one of the 
earliest English Greek scholars. His best-known books are "The Schole- 
master " and " Toxophilus," the latter a treatise on archery. Died, 1 568. 
Sir Thomas Smith was a zealous friend of the Reformation, was Secretary 
of State under Edward VI, and an associate of Lord Burleigh under Eliza- 
beth. He was sent upon important missions. Died, 1577. Sir Walter 
Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer and founder of Emanuel College, 
Cambridge. Died, 1589. Sir Francis Walsingham, called " the most pene- 
trating statesman of his time," was of sagacity and insight so great that in 
the next century it was said : " He saw every man and none saw him." 
With every opportunity of amassing wealth by corrupt means he died so 
poor as hardly to leave enough for his burial. He was one of the instru- 
ments in the conviction of Mary, Queen of Scots, of treason. Died, 1 590. 

56. Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, died 1575. Edmund 
Grind al, Archbishop of Canterbury, died 1583. After the Reformation the 
revenues of the English prelates were greatly reduced, and under Elizabeth 
and her successors the prelates had no opportunity of amassing large for- 
tunes, such as those possessed by their predecessors under Catholic rule. 

57. Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York, was the son of a butcher, 
who by his ability and sagacity rose to the highest influence and wealth 
under Henry VIII. He was made cardinal and legate by Pope Leo X, 
and prime minister by the king. He enjoyed the revenues of several sees, 
gathered an enormous fortune, and lived in a splendor more than regal. 
His fall was occasioned by his w r ant of zeal in serving Henry in procuring 
the divorce from Catherine of Arragon, and he died in disgrace in 1530, on 
his w r ay to London to be tried for high treason. His words in his last 
hours have become famous, although in the version of Shakespeare rather 
than his own : " Had I but served God as diligently as I have served the 
King, He would not have given me over in my gray hairs." 

" Had I but served my God with half the zeal 
I served my king, He would not in mine age 
Have left me naked to mine enemies." 

Henry VIII, hi, 2. 

58. William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I. A man 
of purity of life, but of great intolerance and severity. He was charged 
with treason by the Parliamentarian party after the death of Charles, and 
although the charges could not be satisfactorily established, he was exe- 
cuted in 1645. 

59. Clarendon, Earl of, minister of Charles I, Lord Chancellor under 
Charles II, author of several histories. He diet! in exile in France in 1674. 



NOTES. 147 

60. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, 1667-1745. One of 
the most brilliant and caustic writers of the eighteenth century. His most 
famous works are "The Tale of a Tub" and "Gulliver's Travels." The 
passage alluded to is from a satirical essay called " Directions for Servants." 

61. llobbes, English philosophical writer, known chiefly by a work 
called " Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, 
Ecclesiastical and Civil," published in 1C51. Died, 1679. Bossuet was a 
learned French bishop and author. Died, 1704. 

62. George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was one of the most brilliant 
and corrupt nobles of the dissolute court of Charles II. Dryden has given 
a description of him, under the name Zimri, in the famous political satire, 
" Absalom and Achitophel " : 

' A man so various that he seeni'd to be 
Not one but all mankind's epitome ; 
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, 
Was everything by starts, and nothing long; 
But, in the course of one revolving moon, 
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon. 
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, 
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking. 
Blest madman ! who could every hour employ 
With something new to wish or to enjoy. 
Railing and praising were his usual themes, 
And both, to show his judgments, in extremes. 
So over-violent or over-civil, 
That every man with him was God or devil. 
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art, 
Nothing went unrewarded but desert ; 
Beggar'd by fools whom still he found too late ; 
He had his jest, and they had his estate. 
He laugh'd himself from court, then had relief 
By forming parties, but could ne'er be chief." 

He died in 1688. "The truest type of the time," writes Green, "is the 
Duke of Buckingham, and the most characteristic event in the Duke's life 
was a duel in which he consummated his seduction of Lady Shrewsbury by 
killing her husband, while the Countess in disguise as a page held his 
horse for him, and looked on at the murder." 

63. George Saville, Marquis of Halifax, Lord Privy Seal under James 
II, and afterward under William and Mary. Died, 1695. ^ e published 
a tract called the " Character of a Trimmer," in which he defended his 
position as an independent, belonging to neither party, but as " trimming " 
from one side to the other as the public interest required. 



14S NO TES. 

64. " Lawn sleeves" is a phrase not infrequently used to designate a 
bishop, these being a conspicuous portion of the dress. The scarlet hood, 
worn hanging down the back, is the badge of certain high university degrees. 

65. The Conventicle Act of 1664 imposed a fine on any person over 
sixteen years of age for being present at any assembly — or "conventicle " 
— for holding worship otherwise than according to the Church of England. 
The Five Mile Act of the following year forbade nonconformist clergymen 
to come within five miles of any corporate town or place where they had once 
ministered. Both acts belonged to what was known as the " Clarendon 
Code," a series of measures for the suppression of " dissenters," or " non- 
conformists," those who refused to conform to the forms of worship of the 
Church of England. 

66. The Exclusionists were supporters of the bill first passed by the 
Commons in 1C79, disabling the Duke of York, afterwards James II, as a 
Papist, from succeeding Charles II. The bill was passed by the Commons 
in three successive parliaments, but in each case the parliament was dis- 
solved by Charles, so that the bill never became a law. 

67. The crime of crimping or kidnapping youths for slavery in America 
or in the East Indies continued in England well on in the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Stevenson's novel, " Kidnapped," takes its name from an attempt 
thus to get rid of the hero. 

68. Eli Whitney, a Massachusetts man, inventor of the cotton gin. 
Died, 1825. Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning frame, or 
"spinning jenny." Died, 1792. 

69. Whittle is an old term for knife. The word is used once by Shake- 
speare, and still exists in some of the rural dialects of England. 

70. Geoffrey Chaucer, born about 1340, and died 1400, is called the 
" father of English poetry." lie is the first English author of permanent 
importance. His most famous work, " The Canterbury Tales," still remains 
one of the great classics of the language. 

71. Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1709-17S4, was one of the most famous of 
English men of letters in the middle of the eighteenth century. He is best 
remembered as the author of the first general dictionary of the English 
tongue and as the subject of Boswell's " Life of Johnson," the most re- 
markable biography in the language. 

72. James II, the second son of Charles I, was in his infancy created 
Duke of York. All the income from the postal service was settled upon 
him in the reign of his brother, Charles II. See later in the chapter. 

73. Tunbridge Wells, thirty-one miles southeast of London, where 
chalybeate springs were discovered in 1606, was one of the most fashion- 
able watering-places of the eighteenth century. 



NOTES. 149 

74. Basset was a game of cards resembling faro, enormously popular 
among the fashionable gamblers of London after the Restoration. 

75. The name morris was probably originally Moresco, or some word 
indicating that the dance was derived from the Moors. It was performed 
by players whose costume was hung with small bells, and was a conspicu- 
ous part of English Christmas sports as early as the fourteenth century. 

76. Bramante d'Urbino, 1444-1514, a celebrated Italian architect, who 
began the present church of St. Peter's at Rome. Palladio was also an 
Italian architect, but of reputation inferior to that of Bramante ; 1518-1580. 

77. Christopher Anstey was a satirical poet, of more reputation in his 
own day than since. He lived in the latter part of the eighteenth century, 
dying in 1805, and made a great success by "The New Rath Guide." For 
Smollett, see note 41. Frances Rurney, best known by her novel" Evelina," 
died at Rath, 1840, at the age of eighty-eight. By marriage she was 
Madame d'Arblay. Jane Austen, 1775-1817, still holds rank as one of the 
finest women novelists of the language. Her best-known books are " Sense 
and Sensibility," " Pride and Prejudice," " Emma," and " Persuasion." 
All these writers describe life and society at Rath as it was in the last cen- 
tury, when that city was a fashionable resort and watering-place. 

78. John Hampden, 1 594-1643, and John Pym, 1 584-1643, headed the 
attacks of the Commons upon the government of Charles I. 

79. Richard Cromwell, the son of Oliver, 1626-17 12, succeeded his 
father as Lord Protector in 1658. He was, however, forced to resign in the 
following year. 

80. The Earl of Shaftesbury, 1 621-1683, was at first on the side of 
Charles I, in his struggle with the Commons ; then joined with the latter; 
quarreled with Cromwell, and was excluded from parliament. He was one 
of the deputation sent to invite Charles II to return to England, and under 
this monarch he became Lord Chancellor. He was involved in numerous 
intrigues, and was at last forced to flee to Holland, where he died. He 
figures in " Absalom and Achitophel " as the latter personage, being des- 
cribed as 

" For close designs and crooked counsels fit, 
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit ; 
Restless, unfixed in principles and place, 
In power displeased, impatient of disgrace. 
A fiery soul, which, working out its way, 
Fretted the pigmy body to decay, 
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay. 
A daring pilot in extremity; 

Pleased with the danger when the waves went high, 
He fought the storms ; but, for a calm unfit, 



150 NOTES. 

Would steer too near the sands to show his wit. . . . 

Yet fame deserved no enemy can grudge ; 

The statesman we abhor, but praise the judge. 

In Israel's courts ne'er sat an Abethdin 

With more discerning eyes, or hands more clean ; 

Unbrib'd, unsought, the wretched to redress; 

Swift of dispatch, and easy of access." 

81. Inigo Jones, 1 572-1652, was the most famous architect of his time. 

82. Somers, John, Lord, 1652-17 16, one of the most able statesmen of 
the epoch of the Revolution. 

83. John Tillotson, 1 630-1 694, famous English divine and Archbishop 
of Canterbury. 

84. John Dryden, 1631-1700, poet, playwright, satirist, and essayist. 
His most famous works are "Absalom and Achitophel," "Ode on St. 
Cecilia's Day" (first and second), and "The Hind and the Panther." For 
the honor in which he was held in his old age, see later in the account of 
the coffee-houses. 

85. Sir Isaac Newton, 1642-1727, conceived the theory of gravitation 
about 1666, and presented to the Royal Society in 1686 his famous " I'rin- 
cipia," which set forth the theory as applied to the system of the universe. 
The " Principia " was published in the following year. 

86. Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, 1 676-1 745, Prime Minister 
under George I. He maintained his power by the most wholesale bribery 
and corruption, but he preserved peace at a time when it was essential to 
the prosperity of England. William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, 170S-1778, 
called "the great commoner," was Prime Minister under both George II 
and George III. He warmly advocated conciliatory measures in the treat- 
ment of the American colonies, although opposed to their complete freedom. 

87. The battle of Worcester was fought September 3, 1651, during the 
unsuccessful attempt of Charles II to obtain the throne left vacant by the 
execution of his father. The Scotch Royalist forces were beaten by Crom- 
well, and Charles put to flight, this engagement closing the campaign. 

88. Andrew Marvel was a Parliamentary poet and satirist, famous for 
his attacks on the government of Charles II. Three of his poems are given 
in the "Golden Treasury," numbered lxv, cxl, and cxiv. The first, the 
" Iloratian Ode" to Cromwell, is one of his best-known lyrics. 

89. John Sobieski was king of Poland, 1 674-1696. Doge was the title 
of the chief magistrate of Venice and of Genoa, the office being elective, at 
first for life, but afterward for a fixed term. The office continued in Venice 
from the eighth, and in Genoa from the fourteenth, to the end of the 
eighteenth century. Lawrence Hyde, Earl <>f Rochester, son of the greal 



NOTES. 151 

Earl of Clarendon, became First Lord of the Treasury in 1679. lit was 
opposed to Lord Halifax in the struggle to exclude the Duke of York, 
afterward James II, from the succession on account of his religion. He 
died in 171 1. His dissolute character is sufficiently indicated elsewhere in 
the chapter. 

. go. The Duke of Monmouth was a natural son of Charles II, born 
while that prince was in exile, 1649. As Charles had no legitimate heir, a 
design was formed to secure the succession for Monmouth. Charles re- 
fused to countenance the idea, and twice banished his son to Holland. 
After the death of Charles, Monmouth raised troops, and had himself pro- 
claimed king ; but his forces were routed by those of James II in the battle 
of Sedgemoor, and he was soon after captured and executed. 

91. The foolish trick of affected pronunciation has been the badge of 
the fop for centuries. The Roman satirists made merry over it; Ben Jonson 
jeered at the dandies who in the days of Elizabeth affected an Italian 
accent. In our own day there is plenty of jesting over the affectations of 
those who imitate English speech. At the time of which Macaulay writes 
the fashionable dialect was chiefly notable by the pronunciation of o like a. 
Lord Foppingham is a character in the comedy of Sir John Vanbrugh, 
1 666-1726, called "The Relapse." Foppingham is a wealthy fool who has 
just purchased a title, and the manner in which he is represented as talking 
is probably a fair, if somewhat extreme, example of the manner of the time: 

" Amanda. The inside of a book should recommend it most to us. 

" Lord Fop. That, I must confess, I am not altogether so fand of. Far to my 
mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of another 
man's brain. Naw I think a man of quality and breeding may be much diverted with 
the natural sprauts of his own," etc. 

92. Charles Perrault, 1 628-1 703, a French writer who espoused warmly 
the cause of modern literature as opposed to classical. The quarrel between 
Perrault and Boileau concerning the relative merits of the ancients and 
moderns lasted a dozen years. He is remembered to-day by his collection 
of fairy tales, " Les contcs de ma mere Voye" " Tales of my Mother Goose." 

93. Nicholas Boileau-Despreaux, 1636—17 1 1, a famous French critic and 
poet. He was the father of French criticism, and his " Art poetique" is the 
book upon which were based the theories of the school of poetry in England 
of which Pope was the head. 

94. "Venice Preserved," a tragedy by Thomas Otway, 1651-1685, was 
very popular in its time. It is hardly necessary to remark upon Milton's 
" Paradise Lost," mentioned in the previous line, except to note that in the 
latter part of the seventeenth century the question whether epic and dra- 



152 NOTES. 

matie poetry should be in blank verse or rhyme was very earnestly debated. 
1 >ryden at first wrote tragedies in rhyme, and vigorously defended the 
practice ; but he afterward changed his views. 

95. Jean Baptiste Racine, 1 639-1 699, was one of the most celebrated 
of French dramatic poets. Some of his plays yet keep the French stage, 
and one, at least, the " Phedre," has been in late years played in this 
country by Sara Bernhardt and Madame Duse. Rene Le Bossu, a French 
abbe, published in 1675 a " Traite du poeme epique," a work of more note 
then than it has been since. 

96. The adventure at Gadshill is told by Shakespeare in the second act 
of the First Bart of King Henry IV. Gadshill in more recent times became 
the home of Charles Dickens. 

97. Boniface is a rascally landlord in Farquhar's comedy, " Beaux' 
Stratagem." He furnished information of the movements of travelers to 
Gibbet, the highwayman. The name has come to be used as a general 
term for an innkeeper. 

97a. The allusion is of course to Chaucer, who in the prologue to the 
" Canterbury Tales " makes the personages who were going on the pilgrim- 
age gather at the Tabard Inn. 






" Bifil that in that seson on a day 
In Southwerk at the Tabbard as I lay, 
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage 
To Caunterbury with full devout corage, 
At nyght were come into that hostelyre 
Wei nyne and twenty in a compaignye 
Of sondry folk." 

98. William Shenstone, English poet, 17 14-1763. His best-known 
work is the " Schoolmistress," one of the earliest examples of modern real- 
ism. The reference in the text is to an often-quoted verse, said to have 
been written by Shenstone on the window of an inn : 

" Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round, 
Where'er his stages may have been, 
May sigh to think he still has found 
The warmest welcome of an inn." 

99. Sir Edmundbury Godfrey was the London magistrate before whom 
Titus Oates made a deposition concerning the so-called Popish Plot in 
1 68 1. Godfrey was soon afterward found in a ditch dead from a sword- 
thrust. It was at once assumed that he had been murdered by the 
Catholics, and immense excitement resulted. Edward Coleman was secre- 
tary to the Duchess of York. He was accused by Oates, and among his 



NOTES. 153 

papers, seized when he was arrested, were found letters to the confessor of 
Louis XIV asking for money to be employed in giving "the greatest Mow 
to the Protestant religion it has received since its birth." 

ioo. Titus Oates was a worthless and unscrupulous adventurer, a clergy- 
man convicted of perjury, who devised the story of the so-called Popish 
Plot. He alleged that a general massacre of Protestants by the Catholics 
was intended. The assassination of Godfrey and the papers of Coleman 
gave so strong a color of probability to the tale that it was generally 
received as true by the Protestants. The agitation was fostered by Shaftes- 
bury for political purposes, and when he had gained his ends it died out 
for want of fuel. Oates was pilloried and sentenced to imprisonment. He 
was, however, released after the Revolution. 

101. The Janizaries w T ere the body-guard of the sultan of Turkey. The 
troop was organized in the fourteenth century, and became so large and 
powerful as practically to restrict greatly the power of the sultan. In 1826 
the Janizaries were destroyed by a revolt contrived by Mahmud II, and by 
the massacre by which it was followed. 

102. Blaise Pascal, 1 623-1 662, was a celebrated French mathematician, 
philosopher, and author. Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere, 1622-1673, was 
the greatest French writer of comedies and one of the most brilliant 
geniuses of all literature, except for the four or five of the world's greatest. 

103. Dante Alighieri, 1 265-1 321, the greatest of Italian poets, author 
of the " Vita Nuova " and the " Divine Comedy." It is usual to regard 
Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante as the greatest writers of all time. Tor- 
quato Tasso, 1 544-1 595, a celebrated Italian poet. His most famous 
poem is " Jerusalem Delivered." 

104. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832, was the chief poet and 
one of the great novelists of Germany. His most famous poem is " Faust " ; 
his most celebrated novel " Wilhelm Meister." Friedrich von Schiller, 
1 7 59-1805, a famous German poet, the friend of Goethe. He produced 
numerous plays and works in prose and in verse. His poetic plays, 
" Wallenstein," " Maria Stuart," and " William Tell " are best known. 

105. Lady Jane Grey, 1 537—1 554, the beautiful and ill-fated instrument 
of the ambition of the Duke of Northumberland, who for eleven days after 
the death of Edward VI bore the title of queen. The throne being then 
taken by Mary, Lady Jane was imprisoned in the Tower and afterward 
beheaded. Lucy Hutchinson, 1620-1659, was the daughter of Sir John 
Apsley and wife of Colonel John Hutchinson. After the death of her 
husband she wrote his memoirs, and this book is so valuable from the 
light that it throws on the period covered by it as to be still an authority. 
As both Lady Jane Grey and Mrs. Hutchinson were notable for the high 



154 NOTES. 

cultivation of their minds, Macaulay uses them as a type contrasting 
sharply with the unintellectual women of whom he is writing. 

106. After the Restoration there came into fashion a certain sort of 
enormously long and enormously sentimental romance then in vogue in 
Prance. Two of the most popular of these stories were the " Clelia " and 
" The Grand Cyrus." 

107. Philaris was a tyrant of Agrigentum in Sicily, in the sixth century 
B.C. He is said to have roasted his enemies in a brazen bull so contrived 
that the cries of the victims were made to sound like the natural bellowing 
of that animal. Certain epistles which it was claimed were written by him 
were discovered or forged in the sixteenth century, and much discussion as 
to their genuineness ensued. Richard Bentley, 1662-1742, is held to have 
proved them to be fictitious. 

108. Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, killed in the battle of Newbury, 
1643, fighting on the side of the Royalists. He was a politician and man 
of letters, one of the comparatively limited number of classical scholars in 
England in his time. 

109. Charles James Fox, son of Lord Holland, 1 749-1806, an English 
statesman and orator. He supported the cause of the American colonies 
during the Revolution, and took a conspicuous part in the impeachment of 
Warren Hastings. William Windham, 1750-1810, English statesman and 
orator. George Grenville, 1712-1770, statesman, Prime Minister under 
George III. For Pitt, see note 86. The passage emphasizes the intellec- 
tual inefficiency of the seventeenth century by contrasting its scholarship 
with that of the statesmen in the preceding and following centuries. 

1 10. Augustus, Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus, or more briefly Augustus 
Caesar, was the first Roman Emperor. He was born 63 B.C., and became 
undisputed master of the empire in 31 B.C., although not receiving the title 
"Augustus" until 27 B.C. He died 14 a.d. In his reign Roman literature 
reached its highest development. So great was the time of his reign that 
the term " Augustan Age " became typical of peace and prosperity. He 
gave his name to the month August, and Jesus Christ was born during his 
reign. Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, the Latin poets, were all patronized by 
Augustus, and all wrote in his praise. 

in. This account of the way in which the French language became 
chief among continental tongues, and in England replaced both Latin and 
Greek and the Italian which was the fashionable language at the time of 
Elizabeth is the more interesting from the fact that up to the present time 
French has continued the means of communication between persons of 
different tongues. English is, however, now largely recognized as coming 
into somewhat the same use. 



ii2. Jean de la Fon tair . 

twelve books of fables in vers-: .suet, see ■ . . 

• 

113. John. Dame, r 57 3— ro3r. Eagfesa pee: ■ad di 

114. Abraham Cowley. 1 - English p 
Golden Treasury " by the poem numbered cii. 

115. The Puritan custom of giving to their children whole 
phrases as names is well know: -<ing example i- 

boaCT, a member of Cromwell's Parliament. He is said to have had two 
brothers, one named Christ-came-into-the-world-to-save, and 

-ist-had-not-died-thou-hadst-been-damned. That human nature is much 

me in all ages is JHralialt I 

1 jbreviated the latter name into its last syllable. Tl r of the 

Puritans at all festive celebrations was ir.t-r.-ined when they saw in 1 
anything relating to the Roman Catholic faith ; and thus they esp- 

joined plum-puddings and mini. iiurch 

. A Christmas. Jack in the Green was a character in lac 

ports, represented by a la.. with flow- ..-.ding amid 

- hoops of evergreen. 

116. Richard Crashaw. 1616- A charming specimen 
of his verse is given in the ~ Golden Treasury." Ixxix. 

117. There were a nurr. ?^- among the 
Puritans. The S upralapsarians held the doctrine that before the fall of 
man God had already destined some to eternal life and others to e 

118. Edmund Wal His best-known and 
most delicate poem : Tden Treasury." Ixxxix. 

118a. The allusion is of course to John Milton. 1608— 1674, and I 
great epic, " Paradise Lost," published in : - 

119. Samuel Butler. 16:; remembered by the 9 and 
very bitter satire on Puritanism, " Hudibras." The poem 1 - 

rite with Charles II. 

120. Ben Jonson. .elebrated dramatist and poet of the 
Elizabethan period. His most important p " Epiccene, 
or the Silent Woman." " Ever/ Man in Hi- .'-.I chemist." 

.is grave in Westminster Abbey are - nsca." 

He was assisted in his early dramatic career by - i he was at 

me the traveling tutor to the son of Sir Walter Ralr 

121. Before the Restoration the parts of women had been played by 
young men. This explains the frequency with which the old dramatic 
auth> 1 ; their heroines in male attire. 



156 NOTES. 

122. Pedro ( ) alder on de la Barca, 1600-1681, one of the most celebrated 
of Spanish playwrights and poets, llu wrote more than a hundred plays. 

123. Viola is the charming heroine of " Twelfth Night"; Alceste, the 
hero of " Le Misanthrope," is a high-minded though unreasonable gentle- 
man ; Agnes, in M L'Fxole des Femmes," is the type of the utterly unso- 
phisticated young girl. 

124. Thomas Southern, 1660-1746, British dramatist. His most popu- 
lar play was " Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage," which Mrs. Siddons revived, 
and in which she made her first success forty years after his death. 

125. Thomas Otw r ay, 1651-1685, the principal tragic poet among the 
English dramatists of the seventeenth century. His most famous play was 
" Venice Preserved." See note 94. 

126. Thomas Shad well, 1 640-1 692, playwright and poet laureate, is 
better remembered by the sharpness with which he was satirized by Dryden 
in " MacFlecknoe " and in the second part of " Absalom and Achitophel " 
than for anything he himself wrote. Dryden said of him : 

" The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, 
But Shadwell never deviates into sense." 

His plays, however, although they were exceedingly coarse, were not with- 
out wit. 

127. Juvenal, about 60-140, a noted Roman satirist. 

128. Lucretius, died 55 B.C., a Roman philosophical poet. I lis great 
poem, " De Rerum Natura " (" On the Nature of Things "), treated of 
physics, psychology, and ethics. Mrs. Browning says of him : 

" Lucretius — nobler than his mood : 
Who dropped his plummet down the broad 
Deep universe, and said, ' No God,' 
Finding no bottom : he denied 
Divinely the divine, and died 
Chief poet on the Tiber side 
By grace of God ! " 

A Vision of Poets. 

129. Verulamian doctrine, the theories of Francis Bacon, Baron Veru- 
lam. Bacon endeavored to reform the methods of scientific investigation. 
His service to science was of value, but overestimated at the time of which 
Macaulay writes. It is of course absurd to suppose that the verse quoted 
from Dryden was written to be taken literally. 

130. Prince Rupert, 1 619-1682, nephew of Charles I, commander of the 
cavalry and afterward of the navy in the war between Charles and Parlia- 
ment. After the Restoration he came again into power in the British 



NOTES. 157 

navy. His later years were given to scientific investigation, and he is said 
to have invented " Prince Rupert drops." 

131. John Evelyn, 1620-1706, English author. His diary, first pub- 
lished in the present century, gives most interesting information concerning 
hie time. He devoted many years to the study of gardening, and wrote 
much upon the subject. See note 45. 

132. Hippocrates, a Greek physician, died about 377 B.C. Galen was 
also a Greek physician, dying about 200 a.d. Both left numerous writings, 
and for centuries it was held that whatever did not agree with the doctrines 
of Hippocrates and Galen must necessarily be incorrect. 

133. Robert Boyle, 1627- 1691, Irish chemist and natural philosopher, 
best known as the discoverer of Boyle's law of the elasticity of air. Sir 
Hans Sloane, 1660-17 52, Irish naturalist. He succeeded Sir Isaac New- 
ton as president of the Royal Society. His most important book was one 
upon the natural history of the island of Jamaica. His library of 50,000 
volumes and over 3000 manuscripts formed the nucleus of the British 
Museum. 

134. The intellectual energies of the Middle Ages were largely expended 
in controversies upon obscure points of logic and of theology. Two prin- 
cipal parties were distinguished among the learned men of Europe, — 
those who followed the teachings of Duns Scotus, and those who adhered 
to the school of Thomas Aquinas. The first was a Scotch Franciscan 
friar. Scotus was probably the most clever thinker of the Middle Ages, 
and yet from a corruption of his Christian name, first used in praise and 
afterwards satirically, comes our word "dunce." He died 1308.* St. 
Thomas Aquinas, sometimes called the father of moral philosophy, was 
an Italian, a monk of the Dominican order. He died 1274. 

135. Sir Christopher Wren, 1 632-1 723, one of the most celebrated of 
English architects. After the Great Fire of London he was at the head of 
the reconstruction of the burned district, and designed many of the chief 
churches. St. Paul's Cathedral is his work, and bears on its north door the 
inscription in his memory: "Si monumentum requiris, circumspice" (If you 
seek his monument, look around you). 

136. Louis XIV of France, called " Le Grand." See note 20. 

137. Sir Peter Lely, 161 8-1 680, court painter to Charles II. A large 
number of his portraits of court beauties are to be seen at Hampton Court. 

138. Count Anthony Hamilton, 1646-1720, was a French author of 
Irish descent. He was brother-in-law to the Comte de Gramont, a French 
nobleman of the court of Louis XIV, and afterward of Charles II. 
Hamilton wrote the " Memoires " of Gramont, which are very scandalous, 
but full (jf information about the fashionables of the court of Charles. 



158 NOTES. 

139. Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1 646-1 723, the contemporary and rival of 
Lely. His best portraits were of men, especially a series of portraits of 
English admirals. 

140. William Howard Stafford, 161 2-1 680, was accused by Oates of 
complicity in the Popish Plot (see note 100) and executed. Stafford was 
a man of high personal character, and his protestations of innocence were 
generally believed. His death marked the beginning of the reaction 
against Shaftesbury. 

141. Lord William Russell, 1639-1683, was executed upon the charge 
of being implicated in the Rye House Plot, a conspiracy formed aftei the 
failure of the Exclusion Act to murder the king and the Uuke of York. 

142. The state of the English prisons continued to be a horrible scandal 
until the end of the last century, when they were reformed, chiefly through 
the noble efforts of John Howard, the great philanthropist. When Howard 
examined the prisons in 1774, he found " no separation preserved between 
the sexes, no criminal discipline enforced. Every jail was a chaos of 
cruelty and the foulest immorality, from which the prisoner could escape 
only by sheer starvation or the jail-fever that festered without ceasing in 
these haunts of wretchedness." 



ANNOTATED ENGLISH CLASSICS 

▼ 

ENGLAND IN 1685 

BEING 

CHAPTER III 

OF THE 

HISTORY OF ENGLAND 

BY 

T. B. MACAULAY 



<•* GINN & COMPANY ^ 



f 



, OFC 

BINDERY 



